Modern print technology

The following printing technologies are routinely found in modern printers:

Laser printers and other toner-based printers

Main article: Laser printing

A laser printer rapidly produces high quality text and graphics. As with digital photocopiers and
multifunction printers (MFPs), laser printers employ a xerographic printing process but differ from
analog photocopiers in that the image is produced by the direct scanning of a laser beam across the
printer's photoreceptor.

Another toner-based printer is the LED printer which uses an array of LEDs instead of a laser to cause
toner adhesion to the print drum.

Liquid inkjet printers

Liquid ink cartridge from Hewlett-Packard HP 845C inkjet printer

HP Deskjet, an inkjet printer

Inkjet printers operate by propelling variably sized droplets of liquid ink onto almost any sized page.
They are the most common type of computer printer used by consumers.

Solid ink printers

Main article: Solid ink

Solid ink printers, also known as phase-change ink or hot-melt ink printers, are a type of thermal
transfer printer, graphics sheet printer or 3D printer . They use solid sticks, crayons, pearls or granular
ink materials. Common inks are CMYK-colored ink, similar in consistency to candle wax, which are
melted and fed into a piezo crystal operated print-head. A Thermal transfer printhead jets the liquid ink
on a rotating, oil coated drum. The paper then passes over the print drum, at which time the image is
immediately transferred, or transfixed, to the page. Solid ink printers are most commonly used as color
office printers and are excellent at printing on transparencies and other non-porous media. Solid ink is
also called phase-change or hot-melt ink and was first used by Data Products and Howtek, Inc., in 1984.
[13] Solid ink printers can produce excellent results with text and images. Some solid ink printers have
evolved to print 3D models, for example, Visual Impact Corporation[14] of Windham, NH was started by
retired Howtek employee, Richard Helinski whose 3D patents US4721635 and then US5136515 was
licensed to Sanders Prototype, Inc., later named Solidscape, Inc. Acquisition and operating costs are
similar to laser printers. Drawbacks of the technology include high energy consumption and long warm-
up times from a cold state. Also, some users complain that the resulting prints are difficult to write on,
as the wax tends to repel inks from pens, and are difficult to feed through automatic document feeders,
but these traits have been significantly reduced in later models. This type of thermal transfer printer is
only available from one manufacturer, Xerox, manufactured as part of their Xerox Phaser office printer
line. Previously, solid ink printers were manufactured by Tektronix, but Tektronix sold the printing
business to Xerox in 2001.

Dye-sublimation printers

Main article: Dye-sublimation printer

A disassembled dye sublimation cartridge

A dye-sublimation printer (or dye-sub printer) is a printer that employs a printing process that uses heat
to transfer dye to a medium such as a plastic card, paper, or canvas. The process is usually to lay one
color at a time using a ribbon that has color panels. Dye-sub printers are intended primarily for high-
quality color applications, including color photography; and are less well-suited for text. While once the
province of high-end print shops, dye-sublimation printers are now increasingly used as dedicated
consumer photo printers.

Thermal printers

Receipt printer printing an X timeline

Thermal printers work by selectively heating regions of special heat-sensitive paper. Monochrome
thermal printers are used in cash registers, ATMs, gasoline dispensers and some older inexpensive fax
machines. Colors can be achieved with special papers and different temperatures and heating rates for
different colors; these colored sheets are not required in black-and-white output. One example is Zink (a
portmanteau of "zero ink").
Obsolete and special-purpose printing technologies

Epson MX-80, a popular model of dot-matrix printer in use for many years

The following technologies are either obsolete, or limited to special applications though most were, at
one time, in widespread use.

Impact printers

Impact printers rely on a forcible impact to transfer ink to the media. The impact printer uses a print
head that either hits the surface of the ink ribbon, pressing the ink ribbon against the paper (similar to
the action of a typewriter), or, less commonly, hits the back of the paper, pressing the paper against the
ink ribbon (the IBM 1403 for example). All but the dot matrix printer rely on the use of fully formed
characters, letterforms that represent each of the characters that the printer was capable of printing. In
addition, most of these printers were limited to monochrome, or sometimes two-color, printing in a
single typeface at one time, although bolding and underlining of text could be done by "overstriking",
that is, printing two or more impressions either in the same character position or slightly offset. Impact
printers varieties include typewriter-derived printers, teletypewriter-derived printers, daisywheel
printers, dot matrix printers, and line printers. Dot-matrix printers remain in common use [15] in
businesses where multi-part forms are printed. An overview of impact printing[16] contains a detailed
description of many of the technologies used.