Printer (computing)

The introduction of the low-cost laser printer in 1984, with the first HP LaserJet,[9] and the addition of PostScript in next year's Apple LaserWriter set off a revolution in printing known as desktop publishing.

The HP Deskjet of 1988 offered the same advantages as a laser printer in terms of flexibility, but produced somewhat lower-quality output (depending on the paper) from much less-expensive mechanisms.

Starting around 2010, 3D printing became an area of intense interest, allowing the creation of physical objects with the same sort of effort as an early laser printer required to produce a brochure.

As of the 2020s, 3D printing has become a widespread hobby due to the abundance of cheap 3D printer kits, with the most common process being Fused deposition modeling.

These printers are designed for low-volume, short-turnaround print jobs, requiring minimal setup time to produce a hard copy of a given document.

Generally card printers are designed with laminating, striping, and punching functions, and use desktop or web-based software.

Known encoding techniques are: There are basically two categories of card printer software: desktop-based, and web-based (online).

The web-based solution is good for small businesses that do not anticipate a lot of rapid growth, or organizations who either can not afford a card printer, or do not have the resources to learn how to set up and use one.

Generally speaking, desktop-based solutions involve software, a database (or spreadsheet) and can be installed on a single computer or network.

Plastic cards are laminated after printing to achieve a considerable increase in durability and a greater degree of counterfeit prevention.

Banks and other clearing houses employ automation equipment that relies on the magnetic flux from these specially printed characters to function properly.

Some solid ink printers have evolved to print 3D models, for example, Visual Impact Corporation[14] of Windham, NH was started by retired Howtek employee, Richard Helinski whose 3D patents US4721635 and then US5136515 was licensed to Sanders Prototype, Inc., later named Solidscape, Inc. Acquisition and operating costs are similar to laser printers.

Drawbacks of the technology include high energy consumption and long warm-up times from a cold state.

Monochrome thermal printers are used in cash registers, ATMs, gasoline dispensers and some older inexpensive fax machines.

Some models used a "typebox" that was positioned, in the X- and Y-axes, by a mechanism, and the selected letter form was struck by a hammer.

There was a period during the early home computer era when a range of printers were manufactured under many brands such as the Commodore VIC-1525 using the Seikosha Uni-Hammer system.

This used a single solenoid with an oblique striker that would be actuated 7 times for each column of 7 vertical pixels while the head was moving at a constant speed.

For drum or typebar printers, this appeared as vertical misalignment, with characters being printed slightly above or below the rest of the line.

This was much less noticeable to human vision than vertical misalignment, where characters seemed to bounce up and down in the line, so they were considered as higher quality print.

On the other hand, the mechanical components of line printers operate with tight tolerances and require regular preventive maintenance (PM) to produce a top quality print.

Liquid ink electrostatic printers use a chemical coated paper, which is charged by the print head according to the image of the document.

Since the pens output continuous lines, they were able to produce technical drawings of higher resolution than was achievable with dot-matrix technology.

Printers can be connected to computers in many ways: directly by a dedicated data cable such as the USB, through a short-range radio like Bluetooth, a local area network using cables (such as the Ethernet) or radio (such as WiFi), or on a standalone basis without a computer, using a memory card or other portable data storage device.

Usually pages per minute refers to sparse monochrome office documents, rather than dense pictures which usually print much more slowly, especially color images.

[28] Retailers often apply the "razor and blades" model: a company may sell a printer at cost and make profits on the ink cartridge, paper, or some other replacement part.

This has caused legal disputes regarding the right of companies other than the printer manufacturer to sell compatible ink cartridges.

Other manufacturers, in reaction to the challenges from using this business model, choose to make more money on printers and less on ink, promoting the latter through their advertising campaigns.

The dots are barely visible and contain encoded printer serial numbers, as well as date and time stamps.

[citation needed] As of 2020–2021, the largest worldwide vendor of printers is Hewlett-Packard, followed by Canon, Brother, Seiko Epson and Kyocera.

[32] Other known vendors include NEC, Ricoh, Xerox, Lexmark,[33] OKI, Sharp, Konica Minolta, Samsung, Kodak, Dell, Toshiba, Star Micronics, Citizen and Panasonic.