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 15^th century. Rotary printing press built in 1863 prints on paper using impressions on a cylinder. In the 19^th 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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Created on Dec 31st 1969 18:00. Viewed 0 times.

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