Printer

In order to get a copy of the output for later reference You would require a
printer. Printers are capable of printing at a very high speed. Two commonly used
printers are the dot-matrix printer and the laser printer. Printers are classified on
the basis of a number of parameters like, the mechanism used for printing, speed
of printing, quality of output, direction of printing, and the kind of interface they
have with the computer.

Printers can be broadly classified as impact and non-impact printers.

Let us understand this in detail.

Impact Printers

Impact printers work like typewriters.

The characters are printed by striking the paper i.e., characters are printed

by pressing a typeface against an inked ribbon a paper. Impact printers can

again be classified as Character printers and Line printers.

Character Printers

Character printers print one character at a time. Examples of character

printers are. Dot Matrix Printer and Daisy Wheel Printer.

Dot Matrix Printer

The most commonly used impact printer is the dot-matrix printer (DMP). In a
DMP, tiny hammers or pins strike the ribbon to produce the desired characters.
The print head consists of 9x7 array of pins. Characters to be printed are sent one
at a time to the printer. The characters printed are a series of dots. Dot-matrix are
inexpensive but noisy. They can print both text and graphics. They can print in any
language without additional hardware change. They can also be made to print in
color by changing ribbons. These printers are used everywhere to produce
internal reports and memos needed by organizations.
Daisy Wheel Printer

In a daisy wheel printer, each petal has a character embossed on it. A motor spins
the wheel along with it. When the desired character spins to the correct position,
a print hammer strikes it to produce a character.

Line printers

Line printers print one line at a time. Hence, line printers are generally faster than
character printers. Printing speed varies from 150 lines to 2500 lines per minute.
Some of the line printers are drum printers and chain printers. These can
continuously print for a few hours.

Drum printers

A drum printer consists of a cylindrical drum. The characters to be printed are

embossed on it. A set of print hammers one for each character in a line, are
mounted in front of the drum A character is printed by striking the appropriate
hammer against the embossed character on the surface. The drum completes one
revolution to print one line. The movement of the drum and the striking of the
hammer must synchronize. Otherwise, the printing will not be uniform. As printer
drums are costly they cannot be changed often.

Chain Printer

A chain printer has a steel band on which the characters are embossed. The band
is rotated at a high speed. As the band rotates, a hammer is activated when the
desired character comes in front of it. For every character there will be a hammer.
Here also, the hammer movement and the chain movement must be
synchronized. The main advantage of the chain printer is that its chain can be
easily changed. Thus, different fonts and scripts can be used with the same
printer.
Non-impact printers:

In non-impact printers, there is no contact between the typeface and the paper
while printing. Some examples of the non-impact are laser printer, thermal
printer, and inkjet printer.

Laser Printer

Laser printers print one page at a time. Laser printers use a light beam to form
images on the paper using a toner ink as the medium. Laser printers are quiet
workers. They produce very high quality output both text and graphics. They are
typically used publishing.

Other Non-impact printers

The other type of non-impact printers is thermal printers (which use heat to print
characters on paper) and inkjet printers (which use jets of ink to print characters
on paper). These printers are not in use as much as the laser printers.

Printer Speed

The speed of a printer is measured in terms of cps (characters per second), lps
(lines per second) or ppm (pages per minute)

The speed of

1. a DMP is measured in cps

2. a Drum printer or a Chain printer in lps

3.a Laser printer in ppm

The speed of the printers can vary widely. For example, the speed of a MSP- 145
is 240 cps while that of MSP-155 is 300 cps. A line printer speed can be anywhere
from 5 to 50 lines per second. The speed of Xerox 4010 is 4 ppm. LASER Jet IIISi 17
ppm and MT908 is 8 ppm.
Plotter

A plotter is used to create high-quality visuals on paper, which a printer is

incapable of doing. It can be used to create presentation-charts, graphics, tables
and high quality technical drawings. There are two types of plotters : Drum and
Flat Bed plotter.

Drum Plotter

The paper is placed over the drum that rotates back and forth. A carriage holding
one or more pens is mounted horizontally across the drum. The carriage with the
pens moves horizontally over the paper. Each pen could be filled with different
colors. This plotter has the ability to produce color pictures.

Flat Bed Plotter

In flat bed plotter, the paper does not move. The carriage holding the pens should
provide all motions. Inkjet plotters can also produce large drawings with different
colours.