PRINTING MONO TO MARVELLOUS

Printers are an integral part of home and office life

With the innovation of 3Dprinting, this has moved on to encompass more than just ink on paper and has now become a tool for many professions including medical technology and engineering. We will visit the different types of printers, but more importantly, their different applications and uses.

There are many makes and models of printers, but more importantly, there are different types of printers to complete the task. Several factors must be taken into account when purchasing a printer, primarily, what you will need the printer to accomplish. Do you need monochrome or colour? The cost involved in the maintenance and replacing the ink or toner is also a major influencer on the final buying decision.

Types

Let us start by giving an overview of the different types of printers. In order to make an educated choice, it is always best to visit a store where you can compare the print quality first hand and get a breakdown of the costs for replacing ink or toner. After sales customer care is also an important consideration (as in a repair or service centre), should the need arise - these cannot truly be assessed online.

Dot Matrix printer

This is a printer that has been largely discontinued. It prints by striking a ribbon with a pin, or small metal hammer, so each character will be made up of lots of little dots grouped together. This is still in use where multi-part forms are printed like in banks and some utility companies. Though affordable to run and maintain, they are effective but limiting. You have the option of monochrome or with only one additional colour. These are noisy machines as you can imagine with little hammers clacking multiple times for every letter.

Inkjet printer

Ink jet printers work by propelling droplets of ink onto paper to form an image or text. Most home inkjet printers are inexpensive, relatively small, and lightweight. Commercial-quality inkjet printers are larger, more expensive, and print on a broader range of materials.

The speed of an inkjet printer is usually rated in how many pages per minute it prints in black ink only and how many

pages in colour. The speed of different printers varies, but an average rating is 10.5 pages per minute in black-only ink and five pages per in colour. Most homeuse inkjet printers can handle standard A4 paper. They use ink cartridges, usually with black, yellow, cyan (blue) and magenta (red). There is a chip in the cartridge which will inform you if the ink is running low. Cartridges can be expensive, but some of them can be refilled. Although this is relatively inexpensive, the printed image may be less crisp with refills over time.

Bubble Jet Printer

A Bubble Jet printer is a type of inkjet printer. The main difference between an inkjet and a Bubble Jet printer is that the latter uses heat to prepare the ink, whereas an inkjet printer makes use of piezoelectric crystals. Only one manufacturer (Canon) makes Bubble Jet Printers.

Laser Printer

Laser printers uses a non-impact photocopier technology where there are no keys striking the paper.

When a document is sent to the printer, a laser beam "draws" the document on a selenium-coated drum using electrical charges.

The drum is then rolled in toner, a dry powder type of ink that adheres to the charged image on the drum. The toner is transferred onto the paper and fused using heat and pressure. The speed is higher than that of an inkjet printer at 12 – 20 pages per minute (ppm) in black and about 12 ppm for colour. Toner cartridges are used in laser printers, and these are more expensive than inkjet cartridges, but they also last a lot longer. It will depend on budget and the amount of printing that you need to do.

All in one printer

These machines can perform multiple tasks, like printing, scanning, photocopying, and faxing or e-mailing. Some machines are also capable of collating, stapling, hole punching and duplexing. Many of these types of machines have a security code option so that the printing will only commence after a code has been entered. This ensures privacy and security but also helps with the management of the cost related to this machine. They can be print in black or colour and are a complete solution for those in the office. The higher the speed, the more costly the machine and most of these machines are ideal for an office environment.

Supertank Printer

These printers are inkjet printers, but with a continuous ink system (CISS). Supertank printers differ from traditional inkjet printers in that the printhead is connected via a tube system that draws ink from high-capacity ink tanks, which are filled and refilled via high-capacity ink bottles, eliminating the need for ink cartridges. Cost-per-page (CPP) can be significantly lower than traditional cartridges, since the replacement ink bottles contain enough ink to print thousands of pages, lowering the cost per page considerably. The purchase prices of the machine though are a higher than a conventional inkjet, and even though the ink costs the same as a cartridge, it will last for thousands of pages. The speed may be a little slower but not noticeably. The printer head may dry out if not in regular use, so this is certainly geared toward those that need to print regularly rather than once or twice a month.

Sublimation Printers

All sublimation printing happens through special sublimation printers. There are different types of sublimation printers and they each come with their own set of pros and cons. Sublimation is the name of the process whereby solids are turned into gases, without needing to go through the liquid stage. Heat and a transference material are used. Gases permeate into the top layers of whatever you’re printing on to give you a sharp and highresolution representation of the print design.

It offers the highest resolution and is, therefore, the best way to print photos onto shirts, plates, mugs, display units, etc. You can print different types of surfaces and not just fabrics combined with the ability to print very long-lasting prints that don’t fade easily or get removed by washing.

Here’s the process:

Use a digital printer to produce an image onto special sublimation transfer paper, using sublimation ink. The sublimation paper is then put into a heat press along with the material you’ll be printing onto with the temperature usually between 180 and 200 degrees Celsius. At this point, both the transfer material and the ink are turned from solid to gas. As a gas, it permeates into the fibres of the material you’re printing onto - even ceramic or glass will allow penetration of the gas. Once the heating process is complete and the ink has set into place, the transfer paper locks it in there. The heat and pressure are removed, causing the ink to return to the solid-state and locking it in place. The heat press and the sublimation printer are separate units and aren’t interchangeable. Sublimation printers are often purpose built for a specific task.

LED or LCD Printer

Similar to laser printers, LED (Light Emitting Diode) printers contain a photoreceptive drum where the surface is positively charged with static electricity by a high voltage wire. In an LED printer, however, the negative static charge is instead created by a strip of LEDs that’s either above or below the drum. The pattern of light from the LEDs hits the positively charged drum and erases the charge where it lands, thereby creating a negative charge in the image of the page that it is printing.

Positively charged powdered printer toner is then dispersed on to the drum, sticking where the negative charge has been created by the LEDs. As paper enters the printer’s mechanism, it is positively charged by a separate high voltage wire and as it is pushed past the printing drum, attracts the toner from the negatively charged parts where it has stuck. The sheet of paper then passes between two heated rollers, fusing the toner to the page. These are generally quieter, more compact and more reliable due to no moving elements.

They are also faster than a laser and more energy effective. Liquid Crystal Display, or LCD, printers are essentially the same, using an LCD strip instead of LED or laser to achieve the same thing.

Solid Ink Printer

Solid ink printers use ink in a non-liquid form; a laser-class printer that uses solid wax inks that are melted into a liquid before being used. Instead of jetting the ink onto the paper directly, solid ink printers jet the ink onto a drum. A better registration of colour is obtained by transferring the ink to the drum first and then to the printer, because the drum can be more tightly controlled than moving paper.

The bright and vivid colours it produces is excellent, but the cost of these printers is a bit more than an inkjet.

For people who earn their living based on the vibrancy of their prints this is an ideal solution as it will make their customers happier. Aside from the exceptional print quality, users also find that the actual sticks of ink are tidier and more appropriate for office use, as they do not leave a messy residue. They can be prone to blockages though.

Thermal Printer

Direct thermal printers rely on heat, rather than ink or toner, to transfer an image but uses thermal paper. Due to quality of print, speed, and technological advances it has become increasingly popular and is mostly used in airline, banking, entertainment, retail, grocery, and healthcare industries.

Thermal transfer printers are another type of thermal printer. The printhead of thermal transfer printers presses a waxcoated ink ribbon (or ribbons) onto the surface of the printing material. The wax is melted, exposing the ink, which is transferred to the printing material and dries there.

Plotter Printer

A plotter is a type of printer, commonly called a wide-format printer, that prints vector graphics. It is a piece of computer gear that converts computer commands onto paper line drawings. It draws a line with one or more automatic pens.

Unlike a traditional printer, the plotter uses a pen, marker, pencil, or other writing tools to draw multiple lines. Initially plotters had two separate pens, one moved horizontally, and one moved vertically. These plotters were limited in terms of image complexity because they produced outputs at a slow rate.

Modern plotters employ a sliding roller to move the paper against a stationary pen. Plotter pens are usually hollow fibre rods with a sharpened end. Until the drawing is finished, the ink supply flows and dispenses through the sharpened tip through the centre of the rod. The paper travels vertically and horizontally against the pen. There are different types of plotters:

A drum plotter works as follows:

The plot is produced in one direction by the drum, while the other is produced by the pens moving in the opposite way. A flatbed is another type of plotter that works with paper which is put on a flat surface in a stationary position. In this plotter, the writing pen moves in both the X and Y axes. Flatbed plotter pens are available in several sizes and colours. Unlike a drum plotter, it works by moving a pen over paper rather than a paper beneath the arm.

An inkjet plotter, as the name implies, sprays microscopic droplets of ink onto paper to form an image, text, or pattern. Inkjet plotters are a popular with graphic designers and advertising agencies.

In electrostatic plotters the images are produced on paper by using raster graphics rather than vector graphics. By using toner ink, dot matrix pixels are generated on the paper. The high voltage charges are created on the paper by the plotter, and these charges hit the toner ink for drawing computer-aided designs.

Finally, the cutting plotter, or 3D-plotter, is a large-scale cutting machine that uses blades instead of pens to cut the design. It creates mylar or vinyl lettering and graphics that are pre-cut. The plotter's flat surface is used to place the to-be-cut paper. The plotter receives a command from the computer, and the knife executes it to cut the media to the appropriate dimensions.

3D-Printer

It is basically a Computer Aided Manufacturing or CAM device that creates three-dimensional objects. Similar to a traditional printer, a 3D-printer receives digital data input from a computer and instead of printing the output on paper, the printer builds a three-dimensional model out of a custom material.

3D-printing is also known as additive printing - the core concept of this technology is to add material together in form of deposits, joining or solidifying under computer control. Typically, materials such as plastics, powders (of polyamide, alumite, etc), resins, metal, carbon fibre, graphene, etc. are used to fuse together layer by layer.

Depending on what you need to print, whether in volume or just occasionally, or if you want to create images or actual items, there is a printer for you. �

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Yaletools.com, podi.org