Lesson 14

Installing and
Configuring Printers
• Understanding Printer Types and
Processes
• Installing and Configuring Printers
Understanding Printer Types
and Processes
 introduction
Printers are electromechanical output devices that are used to
put information from the computer onto paper.
Major type of printer
1. Impact printers
i. daisy wheel
ii. dot matrix.
2. Bubble-Jet Printer
I. Thermal inkjet system
II. Piezoelectric Inkjet system
3. Laser printers
a) electrophotographic (EP) print process
b) light-emitting diode (LED) print process.
4. Other Types of Printers
 Solid ink
 Thermal
 Dye sublimation
1-Impact Printers
 Introduction
• Use some form of impact and an inked ribbon
to make an imprint on the paper.
• Typewriters are like impact printers.
• Both use an inked ribbon and an impact head
to make letters on the paper.
• The major difference is that the printer can
accept input from a computer.
• Its receiving instructions one line at a time
There are two major types of impact printers:
1. daisy wheel
2. dot matrix.
 i- daisy wheel
• Is the oldest printing technologies in use
• Their speed is rated by the number of characters per
second (cps) they can print.
Advantages,
Advantages
• multipart forms
• relatively inexpensive compared to the price of a laser
printer
• Finally, the print quality is comparable to that of a
typewriter because it uses a very similar technology.
This typewriter level of quality was given a name: letter
quality (LQ).
Disadvantages
• Slow .(2 to 4 per second)
• it makes a lot of noise when printing
 How its work
• These impact printers contain a wheel
with raised letters and symbols on
each “petal”
• When the printer needs to print a
character, it sends a signal to the
mechanism that contains the wheel.
This mechanism is called the
printhead.
• The printhead rotates the daisy wheel
until the required character is in place.
• An electromechanical hammer (called
a solenoid) then strikes the back of
the petal containing the character.
The character pushes up against an
inked ribbon that ultimately strikes the
paper, making the impression of the
requested character.
 ii- Dot-Matrix Printers
How its work
• The basic principle of a dot-matrix printer is
that a collection of pins,
pins typically 9 or 17 or
24, organized in a rectangular shape, are
pressed against a ribbon,
• higher the number of pins the higher the print
quality.
• The pins in the printhead are wrapped with
coils of wire
• the printer controller sends a signal to the
printhead, which energizes the wires around
the appropriate print wire.
• This turns the print wire into an
electromagnet, which repels the print pin,
forcing it against the ink ribbon and making a
dot on the paper.
 Advantages & disadvantage
Advantages
• can use multipart forms
• quieter than daisy-wheel printers (ballistic cover)
• Faster speed than daisy-wheel printers typically
in the range of 36 to 72cps). Some dot-matrix
printers (like the Epson DFX series) can print at
close to a page per second!
Disadvantage
• The main disadvantage of dot-matrix printers (9
pin) is their image quality, which can be quite
poor compared to the quality produced with a
daisy wheel. (draft quality)
Note (17-24 pin) near letter quality (NLQ).
2- Bubble-Jet Printers
 1-inkjet printers
• Inkjet printers offer the next highest level of print quality
and are relatively cheap compared to laser printers.
• Inkjet printers are great for home use or small office
environments that don’t have large print jobs
• inkjet printers spray ink on the page, but inkjet printers
used a reservoir of ink, a pump, and an ink nozzle to
accomplish this.
They were messy, noisy, and inefficient.
 Bubble-Jet Printer
• This category is an advanced form of an older
technology known as inkjet printers.
printers
• Bubble-jet printers work much more efficiently and are
much cheaper.
Parts of a Typical Bubble-Jet Printer
1. Printhead / ink cartridge
2. Head carriage,
3. stepper motor
4. Belt
5. Maintenance station
6. Paper-feed mechanism
7. Control, interface, and power circuitry
 1-Printhead / ink cartridge
• Printhead contains many small nozzles (usually 100–200) that spray
the ink in small dots onto the page.
• More number of nozzle means higher printer resolution
• These nozzles are typically about 10 micrometers in diameter
(roughly 1/10th of the diameter of a human hair)
• Color bubble-jet printers include multiple printheads, one for each of
the CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) print inks.
• Many times the printhead is part of the ink cartridge,
cartridge which contains
a reservoir of ink and the printhead in a removable package.
• Inside the ink cartridge are several small chambers.
At the top of each chamber are a metal plate and a tube leading to
the ink supply.
There are two methods of spraying the
ink out of the cartridge.
I.Thermal inkjet system
II.Piezoelectric Inkjet system
 I- Thermal inkjet system
• Developed by Hewlett-Packard (HP):
when a particular chamber needs to spray ink, an electric signal is
sent to the heating element, energizing it.
The elements heat up quickly, causing the ink to vaporize.
Because of the expanding ink vapor, the ink is pushed out the pinhole
and forms a bubble.
As the vapor expands, the bubble eventually gets large enough to
break off into a droplet.
The rest of the ink is pulled back into the chamber by the surface
tension of the ink.
When another drop needs to be sprayed, the process begins again.
 II- Piezoelectric Inkjet system
• developed by Epson, uses a piezoelectric element that flexes
when energized.
• The outward flex pushes the ink from the nozzle; on the return, it
sucks more ink from the reservoir.
• When the printer is done printing, the printhead moves back to its
maintenance station.
 2- Head Carriage,
• The printhead carriage is the
component of a bubble-jet printer that
moves back and forth during printing.
• It contains the physical as well as
electronic connections for the
printhead .
• Note the clips that keep the ink
cartridge in place and the electronic
connections for the ink cartridge.
• These connections cause the nozzles
to fire, and if they aren’t kept clean,
you may have printing problems.
• To keep the printhead carriage aligned
and stable while it traverses the page,
the carriage rests on a small metal
stabilizer bar.
 3- Stepper Motor
carriage motor
• The stepper motor and belt
make the printhead carriage
move.
• A stepper motor is a precisely
made electric motor that can
move in the same very small
increments each time it is
activated.
• That way, it can move to the
same position(s) time after time.
 4- carriage belt
• In addition to the motor, a belt
is placed around two small
wheels or pulleys and attached
to the printhead carriage.
• is a belt driven by the carriage
motor and moves the printhead
back and forth across the page
while it prints.
• To keep the printhead carriage
aligned and stable while it
traverses the page, the
carriage rests on a small metal
stabilizer bar.
 5- Maintenance station
• The maintenance station contains a small suction pump and
ink-absorbing pad.
• To keep the ink flowing freely, before each print cycle the
maintenance station pulls ink through the ink nozzles using
vacuum suction.
• This expelled ink is absorbed by the pad.
• The station serves two functions:
1. to provide a place for the printhead to rest when the printer isn’t printing
2. to keep the printhead in working order.
 6- Paper-Feed Mechanism
• The paper-feed mechanism picks up paper
from the paper drawer and feeds it into the
printer.
• This assembly consists of several
smaller assemblies.
1. pickup rollers which are several rubber
rollers with a slightly flat spot; they rub
against the paper as they rotate, and feed
the paper into the printer.
2. separator pads is small cork or rubber
patches which help keep the rest of the
paper in place (so only one sheet goes into
the printer).
Clean pickup rollers (and other
3. paper-feed sensors. tell the printer when it is
rubber rollers) with mild soap and
out of paper, as well as when a paper jam
water and not alcohol.
has occurred during the paper-feed process.
Alcohol can dry out the rollers,
making them ineffective.
4. paper tray which is simply a small plastic tray in the front of the
printer that holds the paper until it is fed into the printer by the
paper-feed mechanism.
• On smaller printers, the paper is placed vertically into a paper
feeder at the back of the printer; it uses gravity, in combination with
feed rollers and separator pads, to get the paper into the printer.
• Generally, more expensive printers use paper trays, because they
hold more paper.
 7- Control, Interface, and
Power Circuitry
• The printer control circuits are usually on a small circuit board that
contains all the circuitry to run the stepper motors the way the
printer needs them to work (back and forth, load paper and then
stop, and so on).
These circuits are also responsible for monitoring the health of the
printer and reporting that information back to the PC.
• interface circuitry (commonly called a port), makes the physical
connection to whatever signal is coming from the computer (parallel,
serial, SCSI, network, infrared, and so on) and also connects the
physical interface to the control circuitry.
The interface circuitry converts the signals from the interface into
the datastream that the printer uses.
• power circuits. convert 110V or 220V house current into the
voltages the bubble-jet printer uses (usually 12V and 5V) and
distribute those voltages to the other printer circuits and
devices that need it.
This is accomplished through the use of a transformer.
A transformer, in this case, takes the 110V or 220V AC
current and changes it to 12V DC (among others).
This transformer can be either internal (incorporated into the
body of the printer) or external.
 The Bubble-Jet Printing
Process
1. You click the Print button (or similar) that initiates the printing
process.
2. The software you are printing from sends the data to be printed to
the printer driver you have selected.
3. The printer driver uses a page-description language to convert the
data being printed into the proper format that the printer can
understand. The driver also ensures that the printer is ready to
print.
4. The printer driver sends the information to the printer via whatever
connection method is being used (USB, network, parallel, and so
on).
5. The printer stores the received data in its onboard print buffer memory.
A print buffer is a small amount of memory (typically 512KB to 16MB)
used to store print jobs as they are received from the printing computer.
This buffer allows several jobs to be printed at once and helps printing to
be completed quickly.
6. If the printer has not printed in a while, the printer’s control circuits
activate a cleaning cycle.
A cleaning cycle is a set of steps the bubble-jet printer goes through in
order to purge the printheads of any dried ink.
It uses a special suction cup and sucking action to pull ink through the
printhead, dislodging any dried ink or clearing stuck passageways.
7. Once the printer is ready to print, the control circuitry activates the
paper-feed motor. This causes a sheet of paper to be fed into the printer
until the paper activates the paper-feed sensor, which stops the feed
until the printhead is in the right position and the leading edge of the
paper is under the printhead.
If the paper doesn’t reach the paper-feed sensor in a specified amount
of time after the stepper motor has been activated, the Out of Paper light
is turned on and a message is sent to the computer.
8. Once the paper is positioned properly, the printhead stepper motor
uses the printhead belt and carriage to move the printhead across
the page, little by little.
The motor is moved one small step, and the printhead sprays the
dots of ink on the paper in the pattern dictated by the control
circuitry.
Typically, this is either a pattern of black dots or a pattern of CMYK
inks that are mixed to make colors.
Then the stepper motor moves the printhead another small step;
the process repeats all the way across the page
9. At the end of a pass across the page, the paper-feed stepper motor
advances the page a small amount.
Then the printhead repeats step 8. Depending on the model, the
printhead either returns to the beginning of the line and prints again
in the same direction only, or it moves backward across the page
so that printing occurs in both directions. This process continues
until the page is finished.
10. Once the page is finished, the feed-stepper motor is actuated and
ejects the page from the printer into the output tray. If more pages
need to print, printing the next page begins again at step 7.
11. Once printing is complete and the final page has been ejected from
the printer, the printhead is parked (locked into rest position) and
the print process is finished.
Laser Printers
 Laser Printers Types
• Laser printers and inkjet printers are referred to as page
printers because they receive their print job instructions one
page at a time (rather than receiving instructions one line at a
time).
There are two major types of page printers:
1. Those that use the electrophotographic (EP) print process
2. Those that use the light-emitting diode (LED) print process.
Each works in basically the same way, with slight differences.
Electrophotographic (EP)
Laser Printers
 Laser Printer Components
1. EP toner cartridge Toner
2. Photosensitive drum
3. Eraser lamp
4. Primary corona
5. Transfer corona
6. Laser
7. Fuser
8. Printer controller
9. Ozone Filter
10.Paper-Transport Assembly
Primary
corona
Eraser lamp
wire
 1- EP toner
cartridge Toner
• The EP toner cartridge as its name suggests, holds the toner.
• Toner is a black carbon substance mixed with polyester resins
(to make it flow better) and iron oxide particles
• In addition to these components, toner contains a
medium called the developer (also called the carrier),
which carries the toner until it is used by the EP process.
• The toner cartridge also contains the EP print drum.
 2-Photosensitive drum / EP drum
(electrostatic photographic drum)
• The photosensitivity comes from the fact that the roller is coated
with specialized photosensitive particles.
• A laser beam inside the printer shines reflected light onto the
surface of the drum, creating a pattern of electrically charged, and
not so charged, areas. The end result is an image on the drum to
be transferred to paper.
• The drum is usually held inside the toner cartridge, but can be
accessed in case it needs to be manually cleaned to remove
excess toner.
• When handling or wiping the drum, use extra caution; any
scratches or dents on the drum will be evident on every print job.
The only remedy is to replace the drum, which normally involves
replacing the entire toner cartridge.
• drum contains a cleaning blade that continuously scrapes the
used toner off the photosensitive drum to keep it clean.
 3- Eraser lamp
• The eraser lamp is used to give the photosensitive
drum a thorough electrical cleaning.
• The eraser lamp shines a light on the entire
surface of the photosensitive drum, neutralizing
the electrical charge.
• This is done to remove any remaining particles
from the drum before the next print job.
 4- Primary corona
(charging corona)-
• The primary corona is a special wire or
roller that rests very close to the
photosensitive drum, but never actually
touches the drum.
• The primary corona wire is responsible for
negatively charging the photosensitive
 5- Transfer corona+
 The transfer corona is responsible for positively charging the
paper before it reaches the toner area.
 To get the image from the drum onto the paper, the paper
must have a positive electrical charge that will draw the toner
away from the drum and onto the paper.
 To prevent the positively charged paper from sticking to the
drum itself, a static charge eliminator is used to remove the
charge from the paper.
There are two types of transfer corona assemblies:
• The transfer corona wire is a small-diameter wire that is
charged by the HVPS. The wire is located in a special
• notch in the floor of the laser printer (under the EP print
cartridge).
• The transfer corona roller performs the same function as the
transfer corona wire, but it’s a roller rather than a wire.
Because the transfer corona roller is directly in contact with
the paper, it supports higher speeds.
• For this reason, the transfer corona wire is no longer used
muchin laser printers.
 6- Laser
 The laser beam is used in the writing process and
creates an image of the page to be printed on the
photosensitive drum.
 The photosensitive drum holds an electrical
charge when not exposed to light.
 Because it is completely dark within the toner
cartridge, when the laser hits areas on the drum,
the drum discharges in the areas hit by the laser,
leaving the image.
 7- Fuser

• If you were to touch a printed piece of paper

after it leaves the laser printer, you would
notice that it is warm, (unless you are wearing
gloves).
• This is a result of the fusing process. When the
toner initially transfers from the drum to the
paper, it is only held there by an electrical
charge. The fuser effectively melts the toner to
the paper.
• When working inside a printer, care should be
taken to avoid contact with the fuser because it
gets very hot.
 8- Printer controller
The controller is a motherboard equivalent
for laser printers; it converts the signals
and messages from the computer to
signals for the various components within
the printer.
Essentially, the controller is a circuit board
that holds the printer’s memory and
communicates with the PC.
 9-Ozone Filter
• Your laser printer uses various high-voltage biases inside the
case. And high voltages create ozone.
• Ozone is a chemically reactive gas that is created by the high-
voltage coronas (charging and transfer) inside the printer. Because
ozone is chemically reactive and can severely reduce the life of
laser printer components, most laser printers contain a filter to
remove ozone gas from inside
• the printer as it is produced.
• This filter must be removed and cleaned with compressed air
• Periodically
• Most newer laser printers don’t have ozone filters. This is because
these printers don’t use transfer corona wires but instead use
transfer corona rollers, which dramatically reduce ozone emissions
 10- Paper-Transport Assembly
•The paper-transport assembly is responsible for moving the
paper through the printer.
• It consists of a stepper motor and several rubberized rollers
that each performs a different function.
•Feed roller, or paper-pickup roller
This D-shaped roller, when activated, rotates against the paper
and pushes one sheet into the printer.
This roller works in conjunction with a special rubber separator
pad to prevent more than one sheet from being fed into the
printer at a time.
•registration roller
There are actually two registration rollers, which work together.
These rollers synchronize the paper movement with the image-
formation process in the EP cartridge.
•Fuser roller
•To make the toner melt, the paper
The Electrophotographic Print
Process
1. Cleaning Phase
2. Conditioning/Charging the Drum
3. Writing
4. Developing
5. Transferring
6. Fusing
 1- Cleaning Phase
• Two things must happen, a physical and an electrical
cleansing.
1. The physical cleaning is accomplished by a rubber blade that
effectively scrapes off the excess toner from the drum, similar The
extra toner is collected in a toner receptacle inside the toner
cartridge. The extra toner will just sit there until the toner cartridge is
replaced.
2. remove the electrical charge. eraser lamp(Fluorescent lamp)
shines on the drum, causing it to lose all of its electrostatic charge.
Fluorescent lamp discharges any remaining charge on the
photosensitive drum.

• If the drum is not being effectively cleaned, the result is poor print
quality, which would manifest itself as residue on the printout from
previous printed pages (ghost).
• In some cases, if it happens a lot, the drum might need to be
changed, or the eraser lamp replaced.
 2- Conditioning/Charging the
Drum-
• In this step, a special wire or roller (called a charging corona)
within the EP toner cartridge (above the photosensitive drum)
gets a high voltage from the HVPS.
• It uses this high voltage to apply a strong, uniform negative
charge (around -600VDC) to the surface of the photosensitive
drum.
 3- Writing

• The laser beam flashes on and off as directed by the

information sent to it as a print job.
• The beam reflects off of mirrors to hit the drum. Wherever the
laser beam hits the photosensitive drum, the negative charge
is reduced from its -600 volt plateau to –100 volts, creating an
image on the drum.
• After the laser light does its job, the drum holds an electrical
representation of the image to be printed.
• At this point, the controller sends a signal to the pickup roller
to feed a piece of paper into the printer, where it stops at the
registration rollers.
 4- Developing
• After the image has been created on the photosensitive drum, the
toner is used to develop the image on the drum.
• Alongside the print drum is a roller called the developing roller.
• The developing roller has a –600V charge, which attracts the toner
from the toner reservoir to the developing roller.
• Because the print drum and the developing roller are both charged
with –600V (except for the areas of the print drum previously
exposed to laser light), the toner from the developing roller is
attracted to the –100V charged areas of the print drum.
• This entire concept is based on the “opposites attract” principle.
Although both the drum and the roller are both negatively charged, –
100V is more positive than –600V, so the toner on the –600V roller is
attracted to –100V areas on the drum.
• Now that the print drum has toner on only the areas of –100V
charge, the image is ready for transfer to paper.
 5- Transferring
• In this phase, the image is transferred from the drum to the
paper.
• To do this, the transfer corona gives the paper a positive
charge (+600VDC) that attracts the negatively charged toner
from the surface of the drum to the positively charged paper.
• In effect, the toner leaps from the drum to the paper. The
image, however, is only held on the paper by a weak static
charge.
To fix it more securely, it needs to be fused to the paper.
• Once the registration rollers move the paper past the corona
wire, the static-eliminator strip removes all charge from that
line of the paper.
 6- Fusing

• The fuser is made up of three main parts: a

halogen heating lamp, a Teflon-coated
aluminum fusing roller, and a rubberized
pressure roller.
• The fuser uses the halogen lamp to heat the
fusing roller to between 329° F (165° C) and
356° F (180° C). As the paper passes between
the two rollers, the pressure roller pushes the
paper against the fusing roller, which melts the
toner into the paper. causing it to stick (or fuse)
to the paper.
 PPM

• Although the process we have just described

seems long and complex, today’s laser printers
are able to perform the entire process in just a few
seconds. Modern high-performance laser printers
can turn out upward of 32 pages per minute, or
PPM. If you figure it out, that means the laser
printer is going though the six-step process in a
little under two seconds.
LED Page Printer Toner
Cartridges
• The only difference
1. the designers of LED page printers made the photosensitive drum and
toner separate, because the problem with laser printers is that the toner
usually runs out before the photosensitive drum needs to be replaced.
2. These printers are basically the same as EP process printers, except
that in the writing step, they use LEDs instead of a laser.
several benefits
– much cheaper than similar laser printers
– because the LEDs are close to the drum, the whole printer is
smaller—about two-thirds the size of a comparable laser printer.
– Finally, LEDs aren’t as dangerous to the eye as lasers
• If they have so many advantages, why isn’t everyone using them?
Mainly because
• LED technology isn’t as advanced as laser technology. The resolutions
of LED page printers have yet to break the 800 dots per inch (dpi) mark.
• toner system in an LED printer, although more efficient, is also messier.
Because of its slight static charge, toner isn’t easy to remove from
surfaces.
 note
• Never ship a printer anywhere with a toner
cartridge installed!
• If the printer is a laser printer, remove the
toner cartridge first.
• If it’s an LED page printer, there is a
method to remove the photosensitive drum
and toner hopper (check your manual for
details).
Other Types of Printers
• The three other major types of printers in use today are as
follows:
1. Solid ink
2. Thermal
3. Dye sublimation
• Keep in mind throughout this section that for the most part,
these printers operate like other printers in many ways:
• They all have a paper-feed mechanism (sheet-fed or roll);
• They all require consumables;
• they all use the same interfaces, for the most part, as other
types of printers;
• they are usually about the same size.
 1-Solid ink
• Solid-ink printers work much like bubble-jet printers. However,
1. in a solid-ink printer, the ink is in a waxy solid form rather than
in liquid form, which allows it to stay fresh and not cause
problems like spillage.
2. In addition, solid-ink printers usually print an entire line at one
time, which makes them faster than bubble-jet printers.
• Because of the type of ink used, solid-ink printers are better
for graphics companies that need true color at a price lower
than a color laser printer.
 2-Thermal
heat-sensitive paper. Using heat-sensitive ribbon
• found in many older fax • uses a heat-sensitive
machines ribbon instead of heat-
• print on a kind of special, waxy sensitive paper.
paper that comes on a roll the
paper turns black when heat • A thermal printhead
passes over it melts wax based ink from
• When it needs to print, the the ribbon onto the paper.
printhead heats and cools These are called thermal
spots on the printhead. The transfer or thermal wax-
paper below the heated
printhead turns black in those transfer printers.
spots.
 Advantages disadvantages
• Thermal direct printers • the paper Is some what
typically have long lives expensive
because they have few • The paper doesn’t last
moving parts. long (especially if it is left
in a very warm place, like
a closed car in summer)
• produces poorer-quality
images
 3-Dye sublimation
• These printers use sheets of solid ink that sublimate, or go from
the solid phase directly to gas.
• During printing, a printhead passes over these sheets (one each
of cyan, magenta, yellow, and gray for tonal change) inside the
printer.
• As it passes over the page, spots on the printhead heat up,
causing the ink under those spots to sublimate into gas.
• This gas then passes through the paper being printed, where
the ink turns back into a solid, embedded into the paper.
• The printhead in most printers makes four passes, one for each
color.
• high quality photo-quality images.
• They take time to produce their images,
• expensive and impractical to use a dye-sublimation printer for
word processing.
‫اللهم انفعني بما‬
‫علمتني‬
‫و علمني ما‬
‫ينفعني‬