What Is The Laser Printers And Ink-jet Printers?

Laser printers were first produced by Gray Starkweather, a Xerox researcher. He accomplished this by making changes in a Xerox copier. This accomplishment soon became a hot seller worldwide. Now it is an extremely common type of a computer printer that rapidly produces high quality texts as well as graphics on a paper.

This comes in black and white as well as coloured format. Though, the coloured laser printer requires four times additional memory when compared to a monochrome printer on a document of the same size. This is due to the four CMYK color separations. These need to be stored in memory before printing starts.

Laser printers have now become a multi billion dollar business around the world.

Whereas the inkjet printers are the most common type used by the consumers today due to a number of reasons. These include low cost, easy to use, printing in vivid colors, and high quality of output.

Three types of technologies are use in inkjet printers. These are thermal, piezoelectric and continuous. The major complaint seen about these printers is the continuous requirement of a colouring agent that stays on the surface. Another point is the rapid dispersement of the carrier itself.

Using an inkjet printer has a number of advantages. They are quieter in printing, print finer details and images, and are widely available.

           This is page printer. In a laser printer output is produced on a light sensitive drum. The computer controls a sharp narrow laser beam. This laser beam is directed very rapidly over the drum, being switched on and off repeatedly. Ink particles are then fused on the paper wherever the laser beam hits the drum. The printed image which can be in the form of text or pictures, is made up of tiny dots or ink particles fused on the paper.  The quality of image generated depends upon the fineness of these dots. General purpose desktop laser printers are now being used for electronic publishing and other high volume commercial printing. Apart from other attractive features of laser printers, they are virtually silent.

           An ink-jet printer is also a non-impact type printer. It creates characters and graphics by spraying very fine jets of quickly drying ink onto the paper. They vary in size from those used with microcomputers to very large machines which are used for high volume commercial printing. They are also virtually silent. The principle of ink jet printer explains that electrostatic field applied between the plates, deflects ink-jet under computer control to form characters. So this is how these printers work.

Printer is an output device. Printers transform the soft copy from computers into hard copy output on paper. Printer is not the part of computer; it is add-on peripheral devices. But they are very important part of computer and are used for large variety of purposes. We can use printer to print different letters, pictures, different business documents etc. parallel port is used to connect the printers. Some printers connect to the system through USB port. In networking printer are not directly connect to the personal computer, single printer is shared by all user. Some printers have facility of scanning, copying and fax.

Different types of printers are available in market. They are dot matrix printers, laser printers, ink jet printer, colour laser, multi function printers, black and white printers and solid Ink printers etc. Dot matrix printers are oldest kind of printer. Laser printers used the idea of photocopier with high quality printouts at faster speed. Laser printers are categorized into black and white printer laser printer and coloured printer. Ink jet printer us most common type of printer. It consists of metal needles and hundreds of tiny guns. These tiny guns are used to print dots of the ink at paper. Different types of ink jet printers use different techniques to fire ink on the paper.

Ink-jet printers: In ink-jet printers tiny nozzle spray charged particles are passed through an electrical field that arranges the charged ink droplets into characters, the ink is absorbed into the paper and dries instantly. Ink-jet printers are reliable, but their operational cost is expensive. They produce quality output at the speed of 300 characters per second. Color ink-jet printers are used to produce graphics for business presentations.

Laser printers: Laser printers are used where the best quality output is the main consideration, they produce high-quality output in the form of text and graphics. Laser printers blend printer and office copier technologies. Laser printers write the desired output image on a copier drum with a light beam that operates under computer control. A difference in electric charge is created on those parts of the drum, which are exposed to attract a toner that attaches itself to the laser-generated charge on the drum. The toner is then permanently fused on the paper with heat or pressure.

Laser printers are also called page printers and their speed is measured in pages per minute (PPM). Commercial laser printers are much faster. The speed ranges from4ppm to 600ppm.color laser printers are also available at affordable prices with relatively low maintenance cast.

Laser printers use a laser and ink jet printers use ink.

The ink-jet printers produce print out results in many tiny ink dot characters. Laser stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of rays. These printers produce high quality results as printouts.