In computing, a printer is a peripheral which makes a persistent human readable representation of

graphics or text on paper or similar physical media.[1] The two most common printer mechanisms are
black and white laser printers used for common documents, and colorinkjet printers which can
produce high quality photograph quality output.
The world's first computer printer was a 19th-century mechanically driven apparatus invented
by Charles Babbage for his difference engine.[2] This system used a series of metal rods with
characters printed on them and stuck a roll of paper against the rods to print the characters. The first
commercial printers generally used mechanisms from electric typewriters and Teletype machines,
which operated in a similar fashion. The demand for higher speed led to the development of new
systems specifically for computer use. Among the systems widely used through the 1980s
were daisy wheel systems similar to typewriters, line printers that produced similar output but at
much higher speed, and dot matrix systems that could mix text and graphics but produced relatively
low-quality output. The plotter was used for those requiring high quality line art like blueprints.
The introduction of the low-cost laser printer in 1984 with the first HP LaserJet, and the addition
of PostScript in next year's Apple LaserWriter, set off a revolution in printing known as desktop
publishing. Laser printers using PostScript mixed text and graphics, like dot-matrix printers, but at
quality levels formerly available only from commercial typesetting systems. By 1990, most simple
printing tasks like fliers and brochures were now created on personal computers and then laser
printed; expensive offset printing systems were being dumped as scrap. The HP Deskjet of 1988
offered the same advantages as laser printer in terms of flexibility, but produced somewhat lower
quality output (depending on the paper) from much less expensive mechanisms. Inkjet systems
rapidly displaced dot matrix and daisy wheel printers from the market. By the 2000s high-quality
printers of this sort had fallen under the $100 price point and became commonplace.
The rapid update of internet email through the 1990s and into the 2000s has largely displaced the
need for printing as a means of moving documents, and a wide variety of reliable storage systems
means that a "physical backup" is of little benefit today. Even the desire for printed output for "offline
reading" while on mass transit or aircraft has been displaced by e-book readers and tablet
computers. Today, traditional printers are being used more for special purposes, like printing
photographs or artwork, and are no longer a must-have peripheral.
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.
These devices are in their earliest stages of development and have not yet become commonplace.

Types of printers[edit]
Personal printers are primarily designed to support individual users, and may be connected to only a
single computer. These printers are designed for low-volume, short-turnaround print jobs, requiring
minimal setup time to produce a hard copy of a given document. However, they are generally slow
devices ranging from 6 to around 25 pages per minute (ppm), and the cost per page is relatively
high. However, this is offset by the on-demand convenience. Some printers can print documents
stored on memory cards or from digital cameras and scanners.
Networked or shared printers are "designed for high-volume, high-speed printing." They are usually
shared by many users on a network and can print at speeds of 45 to around 100 ppm. [3] The Xerox
9700 could achieve 120 ppm.
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.
A 3D printer is a device for making a three-dimensional object from a 3D model or other electronic
data source through additive processes in which successive layers of material ( including plastics,
metals, food, cement, wood, and other materials) are laid down under computer control. It is called a
printer by analogy with an inkjet printer which produces a two-dimensional document by a similar
process of depositing a layer of ink on paper.

Technology[edit]
The choice of print technology has a great effect on the cost of the printer and cost of operation,
speed, quality and permanence of documents, and noise. Some printer technologies don't work with
certain types of physical media, such as carbon paper or transparencies.
A second aspect of printer technology that is often forgotten is resistance to alteration: liquid ink,
such as from an inkjet head or fabric ribbon, becomes absorbed by the paper fibers, so documents
printed with liquid ink are more difficult to alter than documents printed with toner or solid inks, which
do not penetrate below the paper surface.
Cheques can be printed with liquid ink or on special cheque paper with toner anchorage so that
alterations may be detected.[4] The machine-readable lower portion of a cheque must be printed
using MICR toner or ink. Banks and other clearing houses employ automation equipment that relies
on the magnetic flux from these specially printed characters to function properly.

Modern print technology[edit]

The following printing technologies are routinely found in modern printers:
Toner-based printers[edit]
Main article: Laser printer

A laser printer rapidly produces high quality text and graphics. As with digital photocopiers and
multifunction printers (MFPs), laser printers employ a xerographic printing process but differ from
analog photocopiers in that the image is produced by the direct scanning of a laser beam across the
printer's photoreceptor.
Another toner-based printer is the LED printer which uses an array of LEDs instead of a laser to
cause toner adhesion to the print drum.
Liquid inkjet printers[edit]

Liquid ink cartridge from Hewlett-Packard HP 845C inkjet printer

Inkjet printers operate by propelling variably sized droplets of liquid ink onto almost any sized page.
They are the most common type of computer printer used by consumers.
Solid ink printers[edit]
Main article: Solid ink
Solid ink printers, also known as phase-change printers, are a type of thermal transfer printer. They
use solid sticks of CMYK-coloured ink, similar in consistency to candle wax, which are melted and
fed into a piezo crystal operated print-head. The printhead sprays the ink on a rotating, oil coated
drum. The paper then passes over the print drum, at which time the image is immediately
transferred, or transfixed, to the page. Solid ink printers are most commonly used as colour office
printers, and are excellent at printing on transparencies and other non-porous media. Solid ink
printers can produce excellent results. 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. Also, some users complain that the resulting prints are difficult to write on, as the wax tends to
repel inks from pens, and are difficult to feed through automatic document feeders, but these traits
have been significantly reduced in later models. In addition, this type of printer is only available from
one manufacturer, Xerox, manufactured as part of their Xerox Phaser office printer line.
Previously, solid ink printers were manufactured by Tektronix, but Tek sold the printing business to
Xerox in 2001.
Dye-sublimation printers[edit]
Main article: Dye-sublimation printer

A disassembled dye sublimation cartridge.

A dye-sublimation printer (or dye-sub printer) is a printer which employs a printing process that uses
heat to transfer dye to a medium such as a plastic card, paper or canvas. The process is usually to
lay one colour at a time using a ribbon that has colour panels. Dye-sub printers are intended
primarily for high-quality colour applications, including colour photography; and are less well-suited
for text. While once the province of high-end print shops, dye-sublimation printers are now
increasingly used as dedicated consumer photo printers.
Inkless printers[edit]

Receipt printer printing a Twitter timeline

inkless printers work by selectively heating regions of special heat-sensitive paper. Monochrome
thermal printers are used in cash registers, ATMs, gasoline dispensers and some older inexpensive
fax machines. Colours can be achieved with special papers and different temperatures and heating
rates for different colours; these coloured sheets are not required in black-and-white output. One
example is the ZINK technology (Zero INK Technology).[5]

Obsolete and special-purpose printing technologies[edit]

Epson MX-80, a popular model of dot-matrix printer in use for many years

The following technologies are either obsolete, or limited to special applications though most were,
at one time, in widespread use.
Impact printers[edit]

Impact printers rely on a forcible impact to transfer ink to the media. The impact printer uses a print
head that either hits the surface of the ink ribbon, pressing the ink ribbon against the paper (similar
to the action of a typewriter), or, less commonly, hits the back of the paper, pressing the paper
against the ink ribbon (the IBM 1403 for example). All but the dot matrix printer rely on the use
of fully formed characters, letterforms that represent each of the characters that the printer was
capable of printing. In addition, most of these printers were limited to monochrome, or sometimes
two-color, printing in a single typeface at one time, although bolding and underlining of text could be
done by "overstriking", that is, printing two or more impressions either in the same character position
or slightly offset. Impact printers varieties include typewriter-derived printers, teletypewriter-derived
printers, daisywheel printers, dot matrix printers and line printers. Dot matrix printers remain in
common use in businesses where multi-part forms are printed. An overview of impact
printing[6]contains a detailed description of many of the technologies used.
Typewriter-derived printers[edit]

typeball print element from IBM Selectric-type printer

Main articles: Friden Flexowriter and IBM Selectric typewriter

Several different computer printers were simply computer-controllable versions of existing electric
typewriters. The Friden Flexowriter andIBM Selectric-based printers were the most-common
examples. The Flexowriter printed with a conventional typebar mechanism while the Selectric used
IBM's well-known "golf ball" printing mechanism. In either case, the letter form then struck a ribbon
which was pressed against the paper, printing one character at a time. The maximum speed of the
Selectric printer (the faster of the two) was 15.5 characters per second.
Teletypewriter-derived printers[edit]
Main article: Teleprinter
The common teleprinter could easily be interfaced to the computer and became very popular except
for those computers manufactured by IBM. 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. Others
used a type cylinder in a similar way as the Selectric typewriters used their type ball. In either case,

the letter form then struck a ribbon to print the letterform. Most teleprinters operated at ten
characters per second although a few achieved 15 CPS.
Daisy wheel printers[edit]

"daisy wheel" print element

Main article: Daisy wheel printer

Daisy wheel printers operate in much the same fashion as a typewriter. A hammer strikes a wheel
with petals, the "daisy wheel", each petal containing a letter form at its tip. The letter form strikes a
ribbon of ink, depositing the ink on the page and thus printing a character. By rotating the daisy
wheel, different characters are selected for printing. These printers were also referred to as letterquality printersbecause they could produce text which was as clear and crisp as a typewriter. The
fastest letter-quality printers printed at 30 characters per second.
Dot-matrix printers[edit]
Main article: Dot matrix printer

sample output from 9-pin dot matrix printer (one character expanded to show detail)

The term dot matrix printer is used for impact printers that use a matrix of small pins to transfer ink to
the page. The advantage of dot matrix over other impact printers is that they can
producegraphical images in addition to text; however the text is generally of poorer quality than
impact printers that use letterforms (type).
Dot-matrix printers can be broadly divided into two major classes:

Ballistic wire printers

Stored energy printers

Dot matrix printers can either be character-based or line-based (that is, a single horizontal series of
pixels across the page), referring to the configuration of the print head.
In the 1970s & 80s, dot matrix printers were one of the more common types of printers used for
general use, such as for home and small office use. Such printers normally had either 9 or 24 pins
on the print head (early 7 pin printers also existed, which did not print descenders). 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. The angle of the striker would align the dots
vertically even though the head had moved one dot spacing in the time. The vertical dot position was
controlled by a synchronised longitudinally ribbed platen behind the paper that rotated rapidly with a
rib moving vertically seven dot spacings in the time it took to print one pixel column. [7][8] 24-pin print
heads were able to print at a higher quality and started to offer additional type styles and were
marketed as Near Letter Quality by some vendors. Once the price of inkjet printers dropped to the
point where they were competitive with dot matrix printers, dot matrix printers began to fall out of
favour for general use.
Some dot matrix printers, such as the NEC P6300, can be upgraded to print in colour. This is
achieved through the use of a four-colour ribbon mounted on a mechanism (provided in an upgrade
kit that replaces the standard black ribbon mechanism after installation) that raises and lowers the
ribbons as needed. Colour graphics are generally printed in four passes at standard resolution, thus
slowing down printing considerably. As a result, colour graphics can take up to four times longer to
print than standard monochrome graphics, or up to 8-16 times as long at high resolution mode.
Dot matrix printers are still commonly used in low-cost, low-quality applications such as cash
registers, or in demanding, very high volume applications like invoice printing. Impact printing, unlike
laser printing, allows the pressure of the print head to be applied to a stack of two or more forms to
print multi-part documents such as sales invoices and credit card receipts using continuous
stationery with carbonless copy paper. Dot-matrix printers were being superseded even as receipt
printers after the end of the twentieth century.
Line printers[edit]
Main article: Line printer

IBM 1403 line printer

Line printers, as the name implies, print an entire line of text at a time. Four principal designs
existed.

Drum printers, where a horizontally mounted rotating drum carries the entire character set of
the printer repeated in each printable character position. The IBM 1132 printer is an example of
a drum printer. Drum printers were also found in adding machines and other numeric printers
(POS), the dimensions were compact as only a dozen characters needed to be supported. [9]

Chain or train printers, where the character set is arranged multiple times around a linked
chain or a set of character slugs in a track traveling horizontally past the print line. The IBM
1403 is perhaps the must popular, and came in both chain and train varieties. The band printer is
a later variant where the characters are embossed on a flexible steel band. The LP27 from
Digital Equipment Corporation is a band printer.

Bar printers, where the character set is attached to a solid bar that moves horizontally along
the print line, such as the IBM 1443.[10]

A fourth design, used mainly on very early printers such as the IBM 402, featured
independent type bars, one for each printable position. Each bar contained the character set to
be printed. The bars moved vertically to position the character to be printed in front of the print
hammer.[11]

In each case, to print a line, precisely timed hammers strike against the back of the paper at the
exact moment that the correct character to be printed is passing in front of the paper. The paper
presses forward against a ribbon which then presses against the character form and the impression
of the character form is printed onto the paper.

Comb printers, also called line matrix printers, represent the fifth major design. These
printers were a hybrid of dot matrix printing and line printing. In these printers, a comb of
hammers printed a portion of a row of pixels at one time, such as every eighth pixel. By shifting
the comb back and forth slightly, the entire pixel row could be printed, continuing the example, in
just eight cycles. The paper then advanced and the next pixel row was printed. Because far less
motion was involved than in a conventional dot matrix printer, these printers were very fast
compared to dot matrix printers and were competitive in speed with formed-character line
printers while also being able to print dot matrix graphics. The Printronix P7000 series of line
matrix printers are still manufactured as of 2013.

Line printers were the fastest of all impact printers and were used for bulk printing in large computer
centres. A line printer could print at 1100 lines per minute or faster, frequently printing pages more
rapidly than many current laser printers. On the other hand, the mechanical components of line
printers operated with tight tolerances and required regular preventive maintenance (PM) to produce
top quality print. They were virtually never used with personal computers and have now been
replaced by high-speedlaser printers. The legacy of line printers lives on in many computer operating
systems, which use the abbreviations "lp", "lpr", or "LPT" to refer to printers.
Liquid ink electrostatic printers[edit]
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this
article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged
and removed. (May 2012)
Liquid ink electrostatic printers use a chemical coated paper, which is charged by the print head
according to the image of the document. The paper is passed near a pool of liquid ink with the
opposite charge. The charged areas of the paper attract the ink and thus form the image. This
process was developed from the process of electrostatic copying.[12] Color reproduction is very
accurate, and because there is no heating the scale distortion is less than 0.1%. (All laser printers
have an accuracy of 1%.)
Worldwide, most survey offices used this printer before color inkjet plotters become popular. Liquid
ink electrostatic printers were mostly available in 36 to 54 inches (910 to 1,370 mm) width and also 6
color printing. These were also used to print large billboards. It was first introduced by Versatec,
which was later bought by Xerox. 3M also used to make these printers.[13]
Plotters[edit]
Main article: Plotter

A Calcomp 565 drum plotter.

Pen-based plotters were an alternate printing technology once common in engineering and
architectural firms. Pen-based plotters rely on contact with the paper (but not impact, per se) and
special purpose pens that are mechanically run over the paper to create text and images. Since the
pens output continuous lines, they were able to produce technical drawings of higher resolution than
was achievable with dot-matrix technology.[14] Some plotters used roll-fed paper, and therefore had
minimal restriction on the size of the output in one dimension. These plotters were capable of
producing quite sizable drawings.

Other printers[edit]
A number of other sorts of printers are important for historical reasons, or for special purpose uses:

Digital minilab (photographic paper)

Electrolytic printers

Spark printer

Barcode printer multiple technologies, including: thermal printing, inkjet printing, and laser
printing barcodes

Billboard / sign paint spray printers

Laser etching (product packaging) industrial printers

Microsphere (special paper)

Attributes[edit]
Printer control languages[edit]
Most printers other than line printers accept control characters or unique character sequences to
control various printer functions. These may range from shifting from lower to upper case or from
black to red ribbon on typewriter printers to switching fonts and changing character sizes and colors

on raster printers. Early printer controls were not standardized, with each manufacturer's equipment
having its own set. The IBM Personal Printer Data Stream (PPDS) became a commonly used
command set for dot-matrix printers.
Today, most printers accept one or more page description languages (PDLs). Laser printers with
greater processing power frequently offer support for variants of Hewlett-Packard's Printer
Command Language (PCL), PostScript or XML Paper Specification. Most inkjet devices support
manufacturer proprietary PDLs such as ESC/P. The diversity in mobile platforms have led to various
standardization efforts around device PDLs such as the Printer Working Group (PWG's) PWG
Raster.

Printing speed[edit]
The speed of early printers was measured in units of characters per minute (cpm) for character
printers, or lines per minute (lpm) for line printers. Modern printers are measured in pages per
minute (ppm). These measures are used primarily as a marketing tool, and are not as well
standardised as toner yields. Usually pages per minute refers to sparse monochrome office
documents, rather than dense pictures which usually print much more slowly, especially colour
images. PPM are most of the time referring to A4 paper in Europe and letter paper in the United
States, resulting in a 5-10% difference.

Sales[edit]
Since 2005, the world's top selling brand of inkjet and laser printers has been HP, which now has
46% of sales in inkjet and 55.5% in laser printers.[15]

Printing mode[edit]
The data received by a printer may be:

A string of characters

A bitmapped image

A vector image

A computer program written in a page description language, such as PCL or PostScript

Some printers can process all four types of data, others not.

Character printers, such as daisy wheel printers, can handle only plain text data or rather
simple point plots.

Pen plotters typically process vector images. Inkjet based plotters can adequately reproduce
all four.[citation needed]

Modern printing technology, such as laser printers and inkjet printers, can adequately
reproduce all four. This is especially true of printers equipped with support for PCL or PostScript,
which includes the vast majority of printers produced today.

Today it is possible to print everything (even plain text) by sending ready bitmapped images to the
printer. This allows better control over formatting, especially among machines from different vendors.
Many printer drivers do not use the text mode at all, even if the printer is capable of it. [citation needed]