Literature Review on Printers Computer printing has already moved through several stages of innovation, from the first

daisywheel and dot matrix impact printers to common use of the non-impact inkjet printers: inkjet, laser and thermal-transfer. Both the internet and interactive multimedia are providing ways of employing the printed word that adds new possibilities to prints role in culture. "Today's traditional lithographic print industries, specifically firms that are SMEs are facing new challenges, structural change and implementation of new system processes that must be accounted into the firms' future if the firm expects to compete in today's highly digitalized, networked business world. It was written by Horton (1997) in the work entitled: "The Death of Print - The Global, Digital and Virtual Onslaught on the Traditional Print Industry" that: "the traditional print industry - composed of noisy press, messy inks, hundreds of thousands of impressions, highly skilled craftsmen, and a fearsome independence, is merging with other possible versions of a print business - the computer output business, the design service business, the digital print business, the electronic communication business, the global information business, and the customized service business. As a result the print industry is undergoing a slow and often painful revolution, which will take it into the 21st century just as a part of the global information and communication industry." (Ibid)" Printing technology

Inkjet printers have made rapid technological advances in recent years. First, the three-color printer succeeded in making color inkjet printing an affordable option; but as the superior fourcolor models became cheaper to produce and sell, it wound up being the standard and users' choice. Inkjet printing has two chief benefits over laser printers: lower printer cost and color-printing capabilities. But while inkjet printers are priced much less than laser printers, they are actually more expensive to use and maintain. Cartridges need to be changed more frequently and the special coated paper required to produce high-quality output is very expensive. At a cost per page level, inkjet printing costs about 10 times more than laser printing. Inkjet printing, like laser printing, is a non-impact process. Ink is emitted from nozzles while they pass over media. The operation of an inkjet printer is easy to visualize: liquid ink in various colors being squirted onto paper and other media, like plastic film and canvas, to build an image. A print head scans the page in horizontal strips, using the printer's motor assembly to move it from left to right and back again, while the paper is rolled up in vertical steps, again by the printer. A strip (or row) of the image is printed, then the paper moves on, ready for the next strip. To speed things up, the print head doesnt print just a single row of pixels in each pass, but a vertical row of pixels at a time. There are several types of inkjet printing. The most common is "drop on demand" (DOD), which means squirting small droplets of ink onto paper through tiny nozzles; like turning a water hose on and off 5,000 times a second. The amount of ink propelled onto the page is determined by the

print driver software that dictates which nozzles shoot droplets, and when. The nozzles used in inkjet printers are hairbreadth fine and on early models they became easily clogged. On modern inkjet printers this is rarely a problem, but changing cartridges can still be messy on some machines. Another problem with inkjet technology is a tendency for the ink to smudge immediately after printing, but this, too, has improved drastically during the past few years with the development of new ink compositions Most inkjets use thermal technology, whereby heat is used to fire ink onto the paper. There are three main stages in this process. The squirt is initiated by heating the ink to create a bubble until the pressure forces it to burst and hit the paper. The bubble then collapses as the element cools, and the resulting vacuum draws ink from the reservoir to replace the ink that was ejected. Canon and Hewlett-Packard favor this method. Tiny heating elements are used to eject ink droplets from the print head's nozzles. Most thermal inkjets have print heads containing a total of between 300 and 600 nozzles, each about the diameter of a human hair. Dye - based cyan, magenta and yellow inks are normally delivered via a combined three-color (cyan, magenta and yellow) print head. Several small color ink drops typically between four and eight - are typically combined to deliver a variable dot size. Black ink, which is generally based on bigger pigment molecules, is delivered from a separate print head in larger drop volumes of around 35pl. Nozzle density, corresponding to the printer's native resolution, varies between 300 and 600 dpi, while enhanced resolutions of 1200 dpi are increasingly becoming available. Print speed is chiefly a function of the frequency with which the nozzles can be made to fire ink drops and the width of the swath printed by the print head. This is usually around 12MHz and half an inch respectively, giving print speeds of between 4 to 8 ppm for monochrome text and 2 to 4 ppm for color text and graphics. Thermal technology, meanwhile, imposes the limitation that whatever type of ink is used; it must be heat-resistant because the firing process is heat-based. Using heat in thermal printers conversely also creates a need for a cooling, which adds to the overall length of printing time. Piezoelectric print heads use a special crystal that vibrates when electrified. This vibrating crystal acts like a plunger, pushing ink out of the nozzles and drawing more ink in. The main advantage over the thermal print heads is the larger range of inks they can use. It also allows for higher resolutions because the ink nozzles are closer together. Almost all inkjet printers made today use a piezoelectric print head. Both types of print head are stabilized by a solid metal bar, and belt driven by a stepper motor. A stepper motor is special type of electric motor that moves in a precise amount for each electrical pulse it receives. As the print head moves back and forth, the printer fires the ink drops at the right time to form the array of dots that make up a printed shape.

The laser printer uses a beam of laser for the purpose of printing. Laser printing technology is based on the electrostatic principle which delivers the particles in the toner to the paper. The dry toner printing process involves attracting the toner to the paper and fusing the toner with the paper. Laser printers have a drum inside which is the place where the image of the print is processed. When the drum starts to rotate, toner particles (which have magnetic properties) are attracted to exact locations on the paper. The attraction occurs since the drum have opposite polarity compared to the toner. To make the toner stay on the paper, it needs to be melted or fused with the paper while pressure is applied to the toner and the paper at the same time. The heat source in the printer is called the fuser. The need to heat up the fuser is the reason why laser printers always need a warm up period before it can start printing.

References 1. The printing Industry s Challenges (2011,October 07).Retrieved November 10,2011, from http://www.academon.com/Research-Paper-The-PrintingIndustrys-Challenges/98902 2. The Design Manual by David Whitbread 3. Teaching Printing Industry Guidelines and Process Control: The State of the Profession By Dr.Jerry J. Waite 4. A Survey of Digital and Offset Print Quality Issues by Robert Chung Professor School of Print Media Rochester Institute of Technology.