Printing Technologies
Printing has turn out to be a very essential part of modern life. Any visible thing one reads was printed at one point. Before the development of printing, all publications were written by hand, meaning they were limited and expensive.
Around the 3rd century woodblock printing was invented, but it was relatively week and inefficient. The process of printing turned out to be more efficient when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century.
Recently, technology has developed to the point where numerous digital printing technologies are available. Large printer and publishers mostly use a non-digital technique called as offset printing, which is helpful for mass printing. For home use, consumers can make use of many digital options which produce higher quality prints and are much faster.
Line printing is a technique in which type is normally printed on one line at a time. Though line printing is regarded to some extent as outdated, it is still used by people. Line printers are extremely fast, and can print and type at an average rate of 15 pages per minute.
Daisy wheel printers work almost similar to typewriters. The main component of the system is a miniature wheel which has all letters and a many of other characters printed on it. At the time of a printing session, the wheel is turned to line up the suitable character, and a pawl pushes the wheel into the paper, by copying a letter on to it. The result is an extremely high quality print.
The dot matrix system which is also known as impact matrix system, functions by running an ink-soaked ribbon forth and back across paper, constantly impacting down to make an image. Color can be attained by making use of multicolored ribbons. Almost all latest printers make use of dot matrices, but are different from classical dot matrix system as they do not make use of impact for making images.
Thermal printers function by selectively heating paper for making images to appear. Though these printers are quiet and fast, they need special paper, called as a thermal paper, which is very expensive.
Inkjet printers are the most extensively used kind of printer by consumers. They are comparatively cheap, simple to use and possess great functionality. Inkjets are capable of producing high quality color prints along with black and white ones. Moreover, they can print onto numerous mediums by driving different sized droplets of ink.
Laser printers generate letter-quality graphics and text on plain paper. Images are made by a laser scanning across the main photoreceptor of printer. The entire process consists of seven steps, all of which are very much complicated. Because of the highly developed nature of laser printers, they can carry out numerous tasks which other printers are not able to.
