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Printers
A printer is a device used by home computers to produce a hard copy (usually paper) of text or graphics stored on it. Unlike a commercial printing press a home computing printer is a relatively slow device and the cost to print per page is higher. However the quality of home printers is steadily improving, with many low cost machine now capable of nearly equaling the local professional print shop. Some of the latest printers are even solely designed to print photographs from a digital camera (they use specialised photo paper), and come close to the standard found at a professional developer. Currently the most popular print technologies are laser, inkjet, thermal, and toner based (dot matrix and line printers are two now obsolete technologies). Out of these fours main types inkjet has easily become the best selling, most likely because quality inkjet printers are inexpensive to buy compared to say laser printers. But the cost of usage to the end user is higher, per page inkjet printers cost more to use than laser it's main rival in terms of sales. Inkjet use more ink cartridges than laser, because they work by using nozzles to produce small ink bubbles the size of tiny pixels. These tiny pixels of ink allow an inkjet printer to produce high quality text and graphics. Many companies even produce inkjet printers below cost, but then profit by selling the ink at a higher markup, they also try to design their printers so users are forced only to purchase ink from the manufacturer (at a higher markup than a third party). Inkjet printers are also a good deal slower than laser printers, and the paper printed still needs to dry after being printed. Printers are now easy to install, with a program called a driver used to control the printer by a computer. Therefore all you need to do is install the printer is a manufacturer's driver included with your software. If you have lost the software that came with your printer, then you can easily download the latest driver by visiting the manufacturers website.
What are the features I should be looking for in a Printer?
- Colour - Important for presentations, picture images or maps. Bear in mind colour printers are more expensive to operate since they use two ink cartridges.
- Resolution - Measured in dots per inch (dpi). Higher the better he print quality.
- Speed - Measured in sheets per minute, colour printing is slower.
- Memory - Stores the print data, higher the memory the more pages of data it can store.
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