Computer Printers

There are four main types of printer:

1) laser

The laser printer is very expensive to buy but cheap-ish to run. The output quality is very high, and it prints very fast

2) Dot- Matrix

It's very old, very slow, and very noisy. IT also has a poor output quality, however it's cheap to buy and fairly reliable.

3) Ink-Jet or Bubble-Jet

These are cheap-ish to buy. The quality of print is high, and they are quite fast printers. However, the printer inks are very expensive, and if the print-out gets wet, it has a tendency to smear.

4) Dye diffusion printers

This is very expensive, but they have millions of shades of colours Solid Ink printers are page printers that use solid wax ink sticks in a "phase-change" process. They work by liquefying wax ink sticks into reservoirs, and then squirting the ink onto a transfer drum, from where it is cold-fused onto the paper in a single pass. Solid-ink printers offer better color consistency than do most technologies, with little variation caused by changes in temperature, humidity, or type of paper. Solid ink machines have better reliability, because they have fewer components in comparison, for example with color laser printers .

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Dye Sublimation printers are professional devices widely used in demanding graphic arts and photographic applications. True these printers work by heating the ink so that it turns from a solid into a gas. The heating element can be set to different temperatures, thus controlling the amount of ink laid down in one spot. In practice, this means that color is applied as a continuous tone, rather than in dots, as with an inkjet. One color is laid over the whole of one sheet at a time, starting with yellow and ending with black. The ink is on large rolls of film which contain sheets of each color, so for an A4 print it will have an A4-size sheet of yellow, followed by a sheet of cyan, and so on. Dye sublimation requires particularly expensive special paper, as the dyes are designed to diffuse into the paper surface, mixing to create precise color shades.

Portable printers are usually fairly lightweight and sometimes carry the option of using a battery instead of drawing power from the computer. Usually they realize basic print resolutions suitable for plain text printing. You can find on the market the following types of the portable printers: Thermal printer, Thermal transfer printer and Ink-Jet printer. The main advantage of thermal and thermal transfer printers is that they can be very small. The smallest thermal and thermal transfer printers weigh approximately one pound. Usually the ink-jet portable printer weighs more than 2 pounds. Thermal printers require a special type of paper.

Plotters are large-scale printers that are very accurate at reproducing line drawings. They are commonly used for technical drawings such as engineering drawings or architectural blueprints. The two basic types of plotters are called flatbed plotters and drum plotters. Flatbed plotters are horizontally aligned with a flat surface to which a piece of paper is attached. The paper remains stationary and the printer moves pens across the paper to draw the image. Drum plotters, also called upright plotters, are vertically positioned. They have a drum that the paper rolls on. Drum plotters usually make more noise and are more compact than flatbed plotters.

Digital Photo printers Many middle range printers are now able to print photo quality images. Usually an option with color printers, specialist photo print heads allow a greater resolution to be achieved to improve photo image quality. Photo ink jet printers expand their gamuts by adding additional ink colors, usually light cyan and light magenta.

Network printer is a printer that provides output capabilities to all network users.

Multifunction printers: combine top-quality color ink-jet or laser printing with plain-paper and PC faxing, color copying and color scanning , telephoning- all in one convenient, space-saving machine. If you work from home or have a small office a multifunctional device may be ideal.

The Bravo AutoPrinter is the worlds first automated CD/DVD printing system that can truly be called innovative. It combines automatic, robotic-based CD or DVD printing along with full-color, 2400 dpi disc printing all in one compact, desktop unit.

Printers for banking: these printers realize innovative technology and functionality to increase productivity, and reduce costs.
Different types of printers are dot matrix and Laser printers. Dot matrix prints by dots while Laser printer prints by spraying.

Actually what Cycling-rod said is not completely accurate. It depends on the printer model and how it feeds the paper into the machine. It also depends on what you mean by "top" and "bottom" because the way that it feeds in may not be how it feeds out and, thus, the top as it goes into the printer for the printing process may be the bottom when it completes its journey through the output assembly.

The best way to determine which side of the paper is printed is by looking at the input tray. If it shows an icon that looks like blank page with a corner folded over that has lines in it, then it is indicating that it prints on the bottom side of the paper as positioned in the paper tray. If, instead, the lines are on the main part of the icon and the corner is void of such lines, then it means that the top of the input paper is printed. These marks are usually imprinted into the plastic rather than stamped on with paint so that they will not wear off during use. If you cannot find it, however, mark a page as suggested by Cycling-rod and send a test page to the printer and see where your mark ends up. If it is on the side with the print job, you know that is the side that gets printed.

In general, inkjet printers have a semicircular (or C-curve) paper path which means that the side that is on the bottom in the input tray becomes the top when being ejected and it is on that side that the text is usually printed. The printers are designed to do this to prevent the obvious problem of smearing that could occur if the print side was down upon ejection. Because of this, most inkjet printer drivers reverse the page print order from last to first so that when the job is finished, the pages are in the preferred order for the user's convenience.

Laser printers on the other hand can have a number of paper paths internally. For example, the monochrome laser I have in my office has an S-curve path so that it inverts the paper from the paper tray and prints on what starts out as the bottom side and then inverts it again so that it is ejected with the printed side being back on the bottom. The color laser in my office, however, has a semicircular path just like the common inkjets.

I hope this helps. If you have any other questions, feel free to drop me a line and let me know.