Printers

There are several kinds of printers. Toner printers create high quality images by shooting a laser at a large cylinder giving it a negative charge in that spot at which point the toner or fine black powder attaches to it and then rubs onto a piece of paper. If the laser or cylinder becomes damaged they are expensive to replace. Liquid inkjet printers are the most common and the name is self explanatory. It shoots a liquid onto the paper and dries. Solid ink printers melts a wax or plastic onto the paper. Dye-sublimation printers produce high quality images by rapidly heating a solid, usually a wax, into a gas. Thermal printers simply heat specific regions of heat sensitive paper. They produce monochrome pictures. UV printers are still in development by Xerox. They use UV sensitive paper and require no ink. Impact or dot matrix printers are out of production. They produce images by forcible impacting ink onto the paper. The port typically used for wired printers is the parallel port. Instead of using the primary colors of pigment (red, yellow, blue) or primary colors of light (red, green, blue) they use cyan, magnets, yellow, and black because it is more efficient. This can be abbreviated to CMYK.