Technology of Printers - From Wood Block Printer to Wide Format Laser Printer
Printing history dates back to 3000 BC, when texts and images were
duplicated manually. The technology advancement has paved way for wide format
laser printer from simple wood press printing. Woodblock printing was the first
technique for printing letters in China. Flat bed printing was invented in
Germany during the mid 15th century. Rotary printing press built in
1863 prints on paper using impressions on a cylinder. In the 19th century,
chromolithography printers were developed. Offset printing and Screen printing
lead to the invention of the photocopier. In 1960s, thermal printers were
designed to print image with heat sensing print head. Laser printer was based
on the photocopying machine and was first installed in 1979, to print high
volume of texts and images. Laser printers were a huge step forward in the
printing machine and in turn led to digital printing where digital images were
duplicated on to any physical surfaces.
Wide format color printer has a laser which duplicates the image of the
page that has to be printed. It copies in a very fast motion that is repeated
over million times each second. Electrons on the drum that stay charged attract
the toner particles and transfers onto the paper by using intense heat. The
steps involved in printing are raster image processing (the page to be printed
is converted into a bitmap), charging (the photosensitive drum is charged),
exposing (laser is passed through the photoreceptor drum), developing (the
charged surface is introduced to the toner and its particles), transferring
(the drum is pressed on to the paper to transfer the image), fusing (heat is
introduced to fuse the toner particles from the drum on to the paper), cleaning
(when the transfer is finished, plastic blade cleans the excess particles from
the toner each time).
There are many printing technology in the modern printers like toner
based printers, inkjet printers, inkless printers which are thermal printers,
dye sublimation printers unlike the more obsolete printers like impact printers
(forces the ink to be transferred on to the paper), teleprinter (uses the
mechanism of a type writer), daisy wheel printer (wheel rotates to select the
different letters needed for printing the text), line printers (it prints one
line at a time), dot matrix printers (uses pins in the form of matrix to
transfer text or image on to the paper), electrostatic printers (chemical
infused paper is used to print text by the action of opposite electron
charges), spark printers (uses pulsing current to print on an aluminum coated
paper), barcode printers (works with the help of heat like the thermal
printers) and plotters (uses specially designed pens to mechanically draw on
the paper).
Hewlett Packard became the top brand in the sales of printers after 2005
by manufacturing inkjet printers, laser printers and large format printers for
sale. The sales of the Cloud
Printing for professional and personal use have increased rapidly over the
years.
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