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Impact Printers. Early Impact Printers Worked Something Like An Automatic

A printer is a device that transfers text and graphics from a computer to paper. Printers vary in cost, size, speed, and capabilities. More expensive printers provide higher resolution color printing. Printers can be either impact printers, which use physical contact to print, or non-impact printers like inkjet and laser printers. The most important printer qualities for users are color support, resolution, speed, and memory.

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81 views3 pages

Impact Printers. Early Impact Printers Worked Something Like An Automatic

A printer is a device that transfers text and graphics from a computer to paper. Printers vary in cost, size, speed, and capabilities. More expensive printers provide higher resolution color printing. Printers can be either impact printers, which use physical contact to print, or non-impact printers like inkjet and laser printers. The most important printer qualities for users are color support, resolution, speed, and memory.

Uploaded by

yiltoberto
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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A printer is a device that accepts text and graphic output from a computer

and transfers the information to paper, usually to standard size sheets of


paper. Printers vary in size, speed, sophistication, and cost. In general,
more expensive printers are used for higher-resolution color printing.

Personal computer printers can be distinguished as impact or non-


impact printers. Early impact printers worked something like an automatic
typewriter, with a key striking an inked impression on paper for each
printed character. The dot-matrix printer was a popular low-cost personal
computer printer. It's an impact printer that strikes the paper a line at a
time. The best-known non-impact printers are the inkjet printer, of which
several makes of low-cost color printers are an example, and the laser
printer. The inkjet sprays ink from an ink cartridge at very close range to the
paper as it rolls by. The laser printer uses a laser beam reflected from a
mirror to attract ink (called toner ) to selected paper areas as a sheet rolls
over a drum.

The four printer qualities of most interest to most users are:

 Color: Color is important for users who need to print pages for
presentations or maps and other pages where color is part of the
information. Color printers can also be set to print only in black-and-
white. Color printers are more expensive to operate since they use two
ink cartridges (one color and one black ink) that need to be replaced
after a certain number of pages. Users who don't have a specific need
for color and who print a lot of pages will find a black-and-white printer
cheaper to operate.

 Resolution: Printer resolution (the sharpness of text and images on


paper) is usually measured in dots per inch (dpi). Most inexpensive
printers provide sufficient resolution for most purposes at 600 dpi.

 Speed: If you do much printing, the speed of the printer becomes


important. Inexpensive printers print only about 3 to 6 sheets per
minute. Color printing is slower. More expensive printers are much
faster.
 Memory: Most printers come with a small amount of memory (for
example, one megabyte) that can be expanded by the user. Having
more than the minimum amount of memory is helpful and faster when
printing out pages with large images or tables with lines around them
(which the printer treats as a large image).
Printer I/O Interfaces

The most common I/O interface for printers has been


the parallel Centronics interface with a 36- pin plug. In the future, however, new
printers and computers are likely to use a serialinterface, especially Universal
Serial Bus or FireWire with a smaller and less cumbersome plug.

Printer Languages

Printer languages are commands from the computer to the printer to tell the printer
how to format the document being printed. These commands manage font size,
graphics, compression of data sent to the printer, color, etc. The two most popular
printer languages are Postscript and Printer Control Language.

Postscript is a printer language that uses English phrases and programmatic


constructions to describe the appearance of a printed page to the printer. This
printer language was developed by Adobe in 1985. It introduced new features such
as outline fonts and vector graphics. Printers now come from the factory with or
can be loaded with Postscript support. Postscript is not restricted to printers. It can
be used with any device that creates an image using dots such as screen displays,
slide recorders, and image setters.

PCL (Printer Command Language) is an escape code language used to send


commands to the printer for printing documents. Escape code language is so-called
because the escape key begins the command sequence followed by a series of code
numbers. Hewlett Packard originally devised PCL for dot matrix and inkjet
printers. Since its introduction, it has become an industry standard. Other
manufacturers who sell HP clones have copied it. Some of these clones are very
good, but there are small differences in the way they print a page compared to real
HP printers. In 1984, the original HP Laserjet printer was introduced using PCL.
PCL helped change the appearance of low-cost printer documents from poor to
exceptional quality.

Fonts

A font is a set of characters of a specific style and size within an


overall typeface design. Printers use resident fonts and soft fonts to print
documents. Resident fonts are built into the hardware of a printer. They are also
called internal fonts or built-in fonts. All printers come with one or more resident
fonts. Additional fonts can be added by inserting a font cartridge into the printer or
installing soft fonts to the hard drive. Resident fonts cannot be erased unlike soft
fonts. Soft fonts are installed onto the hard drive and then sent to the computer's
memory when a document is printed that uses the particular soft font. Soft fonts
can be purchased in stores or downloaded from the Internet.

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