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Text3. OUTPUT DEVICES. PRINTERS

Printers provide information in a permanent, human-read­able form. They are the most commonly used output devices and are components of almost all computer systems. Printers vary greatly in performance and design. We will classify printers as character printers, line printers and page printers in order to identify three different approaches to printing, each with a dif­ferent speed range. In addition, printers can be described as ei­ther impact or nonimpact. Printers that use electromechanical mechanisms that cause hammers to strike against a ribbon and the paper are called impact printers. Nonimpact printers do not hit or impact a ribbon to print.

Character printers print only orfe character at a time. A type­writer is an example of a character printer. Character printers are the type used with literally all microcomputers as well as on computers of all sizes whenever the printing requirements are not large. Character printers may be of several types. A letter-quality printer is a character printer which produces output of typewriter quality. Letter-quality printers typically have speeds ranging from 10 to 50 characters per second. Dot-matrix print­ers form each character as a pattern of dots. These printers have a lower quality of type but are generally faster printers than the letter-quality printers — in the range of 50 to 200 characters per second. One of the newest types of character printer is the ink-jet printer. It sprays small drops of ink onto paper to form print­ed characters. The ink has a high iron content, which is affect­ed by magnetic fields of the printer. These magnetic fields cause the ink to take the shape of a character as the ink approaches the paper.

Line printers are electromechanical machines used for high-volume paper output on most computer systems. Their print­ing speeds are such that to an observer they appear to be print­ing a line at a time. They are impact printers. The speeds of line printers vary from 100 to 2500 lines per minute. Line printers have been designed to use many different types of printing mechanisms. Two of the most common print mechanisms are the drum and the chain. Drum printers use a solid, cylindrical drum, rotating at a rapid speed. Speeds of drum printers vary from 200 to over 2000 lines per minute. Chain printers have their character set on a rapidly rotating chain called a print chain. Speeds of chain printers range from 400 to 2400 lines per minute.

Page printers are high-speed nonimpact printers. Their print­ing rates are so high that output appears to emerge from the printer a page at a time. A variety of techniques are used in the design of page printers. These techniques, called electrophoto­graphic techniques, have developed from the paper copier tech­nology. Laser-beam printers use a combination of laser beam and electrophotographic techniques to create prjnter output at a rate equal to 18000 lines per minute.