Types of printer

Dot matrix / Impact Matrix printer

A dot matrix printer is an extremely limited printer that doesn’t print letters or numbers. It is designed to print on a grid system. These types of printers are not usually used at home, but they are great for businesses.

One reason a business would use a dot matrix printer is if the business needs to print five or six copies of a page at the same time. Order forms, printing labels, shipping orders, and itineraries must be printed with a dot matrix printer, so it is easier for the business to track orders.

Speed: Given in characters per second (cps), the speed can vary from about 50 to over 500 cps.

Print Quality: Determined by the number of pins (the mechanisms that print the dots), it can vary from 9 to 24. The best dot-matrix printers (24 pins) can produce near letter-quality type, although you can still see a difference if you look closely.

Daisy Wheel Printers

No longer as popular as they were in the 1970s, daisy wheel printers print by physically stamping ink onto paper using a grid system with specific stamps for letters, numbers, and symbols.

When typing a word, the character being typed is raised and then slammed on the paper so it can leave an impression.

If you have ever used a typewriter, then you have seen daisy wheel printers in action.

A type of printer that produces letter-quality type.daisy-wheel is a serial printer A daisy-wheel printer works on the same principle as a ball-head typewriter. The daisy wheel is a disk made of plastic or metal on which characters stand out in relief along the outer edge. To print a character, the printer rotates the disk until the desired letter is facing the paper. Then a hammer strikes the disk, forcing the character to hit an ink ribbon, leaving an impression of the character on the paper. You can change the daisy wheel to print different fonts.

Daisy-wheel printers cannot print graphics, and in general they are noisy and slow, printing from 10 to about 75 characters per second.

Laser Printer

Like a dot-matrix printer, a laser printer creates images with dots. However, as in a photocopying machine, these images are created on a drum, treated with a magnetically charged ink-like toner (powder), and then transferred from drum to paper.

There are good reasons why laser printers are so popular. They produce sharp, crisp images of both text and graphics, providing resolutions from 300 dpi up to 1200 dpi, which is near-typeset quality (NTQ). They are quiet and fast. They can print 4-32 text-only pages per minute for individual microcomputers, and more than 120 pages per minute for mainframes. (Pages with more graphics print more slowly.) They can print in many fonts (type styles and sizes). The more expensive models can print in different colors.

Ink-jet printer

Like laser and dot-matrix printers, ink-jet printers also form images with little dots. Ink-jet printers spray small, electrically charged droplets of ink from four nozzles through holes in a matrix at high speed onto paper.

– Ink-jet printers can print in color and are quieter and much less expensive than a color laser printer. However, they are slower and print in a somewhat lower resolution (300-720 dpi) than laser printers. Some new, expensive ink-jet printers print up 1200 or 1400 dpi.