Printer

Printer

Printers are purely output devices. They produce hard copy output. Computer printers vary widely in their technologies and capabilities. They can be classified in a number of ways. First, they can be classified into three broad groups: character printers, line printers and page printers.
The character printers print one character at a time. Dot matrix printer (DMP), daisy wheel printer, thermal printer and inkjet printer are the various types of character printers. Drum printer and chain printer are line printers. Laser printer and magnetic printer are page printers.

Some of the most commonly used printers are

1. Laser Printer
2. Ink Jet Printer
3. Dot Matrix Printer
4. Line Printer

Laser Printer

A laser printer produces high quality print that one normally finds in publishing. It is extremely fast and quiet. Moreover, the operation of a laser printer is easy with automatic paper loading and no smudging or messing up of ink ribbons. The fastest laser printer can print up to 200 pages per minute in monochrome (black and white) and up to 100 pages per minute in colour.

Ink-Jet Printer

An ink-jet printer creates an image directly on paper by spraying ink through as many as 64 tiny nozzles. Although the image it produces is not generally quite as sharp as the output of a laser printer, the quality of ink-jet images is still high.
In general, ink-jet printer offers an excellent middle ground between dot matrix and laser printer. Like laser printer, an ink-jet printer is quiet and convenient, but not particularly fast. Typically, an ink-jet printer is more expensive than a dot-matrix printer, but costs only half as much as a laser printer.

Dot Matrix Printer

The dot matrix printer was very popular at one point of time. It is a very versatile and inexpensive output device. In dot matrix printer the print head physically "hits" the paper through the ribbon and produces text (or images) by combinations of dots; hence the name dot matrix printer. Its speed is measured in characters per second (CPS). Although it is less expensive, it is louder, slower and produces lower print quality.

Line Printer

A line printer is generally used with large computer systems to produce text based data processing reports. Line printers are high-speed printers with speeds ranging anywhere from 100 to about 3800 lines per minute. In the past, print quality on line printers was not high. Developments in technology are improving the print quality on line printers. These are in the cost range of lacs of Rupees.