Introduction to Printers

Printer
 A printer is a peripheral device which makes a representation of
an electronic document on physical media.
 It is an external hardware device which is responsible for taking
computer data and generating a hard copy of that data.
 Printers are one of the most used peripherals on computers and
are commonly used to print text, images, and photos. Some
printers can print documents stored on memory cards or from
digital cameras and scanners.
 The world's first computer printer was a 19th-century
mechanically driven apparatus invented by Charles Babbage for
his difference engine

Video tutorial on How to
Print?

Classification of Printers
Printer
Impact Printer
Non-Impact
Printer
Daisy
Wheel
Dot-
Matrix
Ink-jet
Therm
al
Laser

Classification of Printers
 In terms of the technology utilized, printers fall into
the following categories:
 Impact printers and non impact printers
 Impact printers are further classified as:
1. Daisy Wheel Printer
2. Dot Matrix Printer
 Non Impact printers are further classified as:
1. Ink-jet Printer
2. Thermal Printer
3. Laser Printer

Impact Printers
 Printers that work by applying force in other words by
striking upon an ink ribbon are called impact printer.
 An impact printer operates by striking a metal or plastic
head (called print head) against an ink ribbon. The inked
ribbon placed between the print head and the paper.
 Then it is pressed against the paper to deposit the ink on
the page in the desired shape, marking the page with the
appropriate character, dot, line, or symbol.
 Daisy-wheel, dot-matrix, and line printers are impact
printers.
 Impact printers produces heavy noise.

Non-Impact Printers
 The printers that prints on paper without striking the
paper are known as non-impact printers
 They does not work by applying force
 Non-impact printers include laser printers and ink-jet
printers.
 Non Impact printers are less quieter
 Non-Impact can print up to 24 pages per minute
 While impact printers still have some uses (such as
printing carbon copies), most printers are now non-
impact printers.

Impact VS Non-Impact
1. Impact printers functions by applying force, where
non impact printers does not do so.
2. Non-Impact printers prints without touching the
paper, where impact printers does not do so.
3. Non-Impact printers are faster and produce high
quality output than impact printers.
4. Non-Impact produce almost no noise during printing
where impact printers produce loud noise while
printing.
5. Non-Impact printers print more pages per minutes

Dot Matrix Printer
 Dot Matrix were 1st
introduced by Centronics in 1970. The term
dot matrix refers to the process of placing dots to form an image.
 However, unlike a typewriter or daisy wheel printer, letters are
drawn out of a dot matrix, and thus, varied fonts and arbitrary
graphics can be produced
 Its speed is usually 30 to 1000 characters per second (cps).
 This is the cheapest and the most noisy printer and has a low
print quality.

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How Dot-Matrix works?
 Dot matrix printer uses a print head that runs back and forth,
or in an up and down motion, on the page and prints by striking
an ink-soaked cloth ribbon against the paper, like a typewriter.
 The dot matrix prints one character at a time as the print head
moves across the paper. Each dot is produced by a tiny metal
rod, also called a "pin", which is driven forward by the power of
a tiny electromagnet or solenoid.
 This printer arranges dots to form characters and all kinds of
images. The portion of the printer containing the pins is called
the print head.
 The Dot Matrix printer, generally prints one line of text at a time.
There are two approaches to achieve this: serial dot matrix and
line dot matrix printer.

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How Dot-Matrix works?
 The serial dot matrix printers use a horizontally moving print
head. The print head can be thought of a single character box
with pins arranged in it. The pins are arranged in four
horizontally displaced columns, where each horizontal columns
contains seven pins in vertical, which is the height of the
character box. Thereby, up to 48 pins can be used to form the
characters of a line while the print head moves horizontally.
 In a considerably different configuration, the line dot matrix
printers use a fixed print head almost as wide as the paper
utilizing a horizontal line of thousands of pins for printing.
Sometimes two horizontally slightly displaced rows are used to
improve the effective dot density through interleaving. These
printers print a whole line at once while the paper moves
forward below the print head.

Serial VS Line Dot Matrix
 The printing speed of serial dot matrix printers with moving
heads varies from 50 to 550 cps. In contrast to this, line matrix
printers are capable of printing much more than 1000 cps,
resulting in a throughput of up to 800 pages/hour.
 Because the printing involves mechanical pressure, both of these
types of printers can create carbon copies and carbonless copies.
 Line dot matrix printers are used for the professional heavy-
duty market printing. Every aspect of the line matrix printer is
designed to deliver higher reliability, faster throughput, and
greater resistance to rough handling and hazardous
environmental conditions

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A typical dot matrix output

 Problems generally found on the following issues:
 Print head: The ink from the ribbon can clog the tiny pins.
Pins can be bent. Electromagnet can be damaged. Print heads
are expensive.
 Ribbon: Poor print quality can simply mean that the ribbon
needs to be replaced. Cartridges vary from printer to printer
thus they are not interchangeable.
 Overheating : Dot matrix printers are noisy. They are often
kept under a padded, sound proofed cover. Less ventilation
lead to overheating.
 Paper jams : Big problem. Perforated sides can be ripped off
easily, jamming the printer.
Issues Related to Dot Matrix

Daisy Wheel Printer
 A daisy wheel printer is basically an impact printer
consisting of a wheel and attached extensions on which
molded metal characters are mounted. A daisy wheel
printer produces letter quality print and it can’t produce
graphics output.

How Daisy Wheel works?
 In a daisy wheel printer, a hammer presses the wheel
against a ribbon which in turn makes an ink stain on the
paper in the form of a character mounted on the wheel
extensions.
 These printers are very noisy as there occur great
movement during the printing. Its printing speed is also
very slow , less than 90cps.

Ink-Jet Printer
 Inkjet technology was developed in the 1960s, but first
commercialized by IBM in 1976.
 Ink-jet printer is type of non-impact printer. It creates output on
paper by spraying tiny drops of liquid ink.
 Inkjet printer has print-head that can spray very fine drops of
ink. It consists of print cartridge filled with liquid ink and has
small nozzles in form of matrix.

How Inkjet Printer works?
1. Print head having four ink
cartridges moves .
2. Software instructs where to apply
dots of ink, which color and what
quantity to use.
3. Electrical pulses are sent to the
resistors behind each nozzle.
4. Vapor bubbles of ink are formed by
resistors and the ink is forced to
the paper through nozzles.
5. A matrix of dots called print head
forms characters and pictures.
Color cartridge showing inkjet
nozzles

How Ink-Jet Printer works?
 Characters and graphics are sprayed line by line as a print head
scans horizontally across the paper. An ink-filled print cartridge
is attached to the inkjet's print head. The print head contains 50
or more ink-filled chambers, each attached to a nozzle. An
electrical pulse flows through thin resistors at the bottom of each
chamber. When current flows through a resistor, the resistor
heats a thin layer of ink at the bottom of the chamber to more
than 900 degrees Fahrenheit. The ink boils and forms a bubble.
 As the bubble expands, it pushes ink through the nozzle to form a
droplet at the tip of the nozzle, and the droplet sprays onto the
paper. The volume of the ejected ink is about one millionth that of
a drop of water from an eye-dropper. A typical character is
formed by an array of these drops 20 across and 20 high. As the
resistor cools, the bubble collapses.

Evaluation of Ink-jet Printer
 These printers have resolution ranging from 300 to 720
dpi.
 The ink-jet printers have low price than laser printers.
They are also slower and have low print quality than
laser printer. However, They are faster and have hight
print quality than dot matrix printers.
 The printing speed of ink-jet printer is from 1 to 6
pages per minute

Issues Related to Ink-Jet
 Problems generally found on the following issues:
 Cartridges: Ink can dry out over time. If large amounts of
printing is done, the cost can be more than a laser. They are
also subject to mold growing in the ink, which forces ink out the
nozzle.
 Refills: Cartridges can be refilled, but the quality of refill ink is
often less than OEM standards, and after a few uses, the nozzles
are worn out, and ink drips.
 Cost: While the printer is usually cheap, the cartridges can be
expensive, and often hard to find.
 Paper jams: Moisture in paper often causes paper to misfeed.

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Print Quality
 The output produced by printers is said to be either
1. Near typeset quality: A Lower quality print similar to the
output of a type-writer.
2. Letter quality: Print made up by fully formed (solid line)
characters.
3. Near letter quality: A print of high quality formed by
multiple passes of print head over the same letter.
4. Standard quality: A high quality print formed by a single
pass of the print head.
5. Draft quality: A print formed with minimum number of
dots or lines and are smaller than the standard quality
characters.

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Factors affecting print quality
1. DPI: It is a measurement of printer’s resolution
indicating how many ink dots can be placed by the
printer in one square inch. The higher the DPI, the
sharper is image.
2. Type of printer: Each type of printer has its own
capabilities of printing. Some types of printers produce
high quality print while other produce low quality print.
3. Print Mode: The printing mode may also affect the
quality. For example the draft mode increases the print
rate but quality is reduced.
4. Toner: The quality and amount of toner also affects
print quality.

Printer Interfaces
 There are several different interfaces or ways a printer can
connect to the computer. Today the most common way a
printer connects to a printer is using USB.
1. Cat5
2. Firewire
3. MPP-1150
4. Parallel port
5. SCSI
6. Serial port
7. USB

Printer Interfaces
 Cat5: Category 5 is a network cable that consists of four twisted
pairs of copper wire terminated by a RJ-45 connector.
 Firewire: also called IEEE-1394. It was developed by Apple and is
a bus that has a bandwidth of 400-800 Mbps. It is hot swappable.
Hot-swappable is the capability of being able to disconnect and
connect devices while the computer or other device is on and
ability to detect devices without reboot the computer or device.
eSATA, FireWire, and USB are examples of Interfaces that are hot-
swappable.
 MPP-1150: it is a serial interface that connects to a printer 36-pin
connector.
 Parallel port: Found on IBM compatible computers and is a 25-pin
(developed by Epson) computer interface. Commonly used.
 SCSI: Small Computer System Interface, SCSI is pronounced as
"Scuzzy“.

What is Virtual Printer?
 A virtual printer is a piece of computer software whose user
interface and API resembles that of a printer driver, but which is
not connected with a physical computer printer.
 When a user requests a document to printed by a virtual printer,
then, instead of having the document printed on paper or other
material, the underlying software process its contents in some
other way, that it results in writing the document in a file.
 Example: nitro pdf reader enable to print document in a pdf file
or create a pdf file from a doc file using virtual printing
functionality.
 Typical uses of virtual printers include: Saving a document to
another format such as a PDF file and Saving multiple documents
into a single document

Consideration While Buying a
Printer
 To choose a printer from a printer’s family following
considerations are to be made.
1. What’s the budget?
2. Is color needed or just black& white?
3. What is the Volume of the output?
4. How important is the quality of the output?
5. What special features are needed?
6. Is the printer is to be used by a single user or a whole
network?

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Printer for Different users
1. For home users: the quality of the print and the price of the
printer both matter. So a better choice in such case is a portable
color Inkjet printer. If the budget of the user is good enough
then the best choice is a personal laser printer which enhances
both the speed and quality of the print.
2. For small and medium offices: a better option is a multi-
function printer which is an integrated device fulfilling various
requirement of the office. For better output, a laser printer is
the best choice.
3. For banks, large business organizations: In banks, large size
business environments and companies printers with networking
capabilities should be preferred which can increase productivity
and reduce the cost without compromising on the quality. Of
course laser printer is quite suitable choice but multi-functional
printer and inkjet printer can also play vital role.

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References
 Books:
1. Fundamentals of Electronic Data Processing. By: S.Jaiswal
2. COMPUTERS. By: Larry Long/Nancy Long.
3. Introduction to Computer (Course book)
 Websites:
1. http://redhat.com/docs/manuals
2. http://doit.ort.org/course/output/307.htm
3. http://deverace.com/printers_types.html
4. http://howstuffworks.com
5. http://prenhall.com/long

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Md. Shakhawat Hossain
Student of Department of Computer Science &
Engineering
University of Rajshahi
E-mail: mshimul86@gmail.com

Introduction to Printers

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Introduction to Printers