What is the difference between a laser printer and a line printer?

Answer 1

A "serial printer" is a printer that use one cable that send "1" or "0" after one another to be understood as a character by the recipient device. The most common serial interface is "RS232" which may be used to control a fleet of devices, also printers. Because of obvious speed issues, to transfer a huge picture on an RS232 would take hours, the modern printers cannot use this interface for that, so instead, they use the "parallel" or "Line Printer" interface - where multiple wires send signals to the printer at once - as they used to in old days to the line printers.

On an old PC, you have the serial interface, RS232, on the "COM" port that you also used to attach the mouse to, while the Line Printer or "parallel" interface is the broad "LPR" connector used for printers and scanners and tape stations before USB was invented.

The question is "fish and fowl"...

The line printer is a specific type of printer where the letters spun around using chains and was halted to bring the correct imprint - 132 characters in one shot.

This could in theory only use a serial interface, it needed a parallel interface. The serial printer was one made with a buffer of many lines, to compensate for the low speed on the single wire (typically max 9600 bits per second). You may for instance drop the transfer of blank characters at the end of the line - most lines are less than 132 characters. There are other serial interfaces for shorter cables and higher speed. I remember just the Diablo printer (by Xerox) as capable of using the serial port, but expect that any printer could use it, also line printers. The serial interface could work for about 100 feet, while a parallel one less than 10. With the serial interface the printer could be away from the server, while the line printer had to be close to the server. With "Current loop" - a variant of RS232, where the signals travels on a live line, this could be extended at least 300 feet, and speed up to 64K bit per second - half of this was typical.

Answer 2

A line printer uses characters.

A laser printer uses pixels.

A line printer is also known as a chain printer where the entire character font set is built up in metal type, with one character mounted on each link of the chain. The faces of the metal characters are wetted by moving across an ink pad.

Each character position on the line has a hammer. When the right character is in the proper position, the hammer fires and then the paper gets pressed against the inked typeface to get an imprint.

A laser printer uses a revolving charged glass cylinder. The laser can discharge the glass at points where no ink is wanted, causing the no toner to stick onto the surface of the cylinder at those points.

Then the paper is pressed against the cylinder as it revolves, transferring the toner from the cylinder to the paper.

The paper is then passed over a heater to melt and fuse the toner to the paper.

Answer 3

what are the differences between line and page printer

Answer 4

A character printer prints each letter individually. A line printer prints the whole line of text at one time.