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| Printing techniques & a little bit of history |
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There are different types of printers on the market which have different printing methods. Each printer has its own defaults, qualities and applications. Here below, is a comparative chart of the various technologies used for printing:
The wire-matrix printer The wire-matrix printer was the first to be launched on the market. The ink is drenched on a ribbon and is transferred on paper with needles by impact as on a typewriter. This printing by impact makes it possible to use carbon papers. They are in general used for printing invoices, delivery orders, etc. The print head runs 9, 18 or 27 needles which are distributed each time on 9 needles on top.. The more there are needles, the better is the impression, and it’s also possible to pass several times on the same point. Ribbon can occasionally consist of several colours. Speed is expressed in characters per seconds or lines per seconds. A wire-matrix printer consists of:
Inkjet technology emerged in the early 90's. This technology is the most common nowadays, it's cheap and you get a good printing quality. They are all in colours, although certain models use only one cartridge at the same time: black or 3 colours. Operation standards for inkjets were discovered in the 70's, when a researcher of CANON placed by accident a soldering iron and a syringe filled with ink into contact with each other. This created a bubble and made the ink spout out of the syringe. In its current developed form, operation standards for inkjet printers do not differ in any way of what was discovered by accident: electrical impulses in the heating element produces each second several thousands of sudden temperature rises by second (between 300 and 500° C). Each one of them produces a tiny bubble: this bubble exerts a pressure which ejects just one extremely thin droplet through a tube (called print tube). When the pressure decreases, the vacuum created attracts a new drop of ink and the process starts again. The print head can receive thousands of similar signals per second. While the print head impression sweeps paper back and forth, the print tube ejects thousands of tiny drops each second. This technology requires a not too absorbent paper. Time between ink deposit and its drying produces the print quality. If the paper quality is too absorbent, the ink will stain the paper. The progress comes in particular from photo printing. The objective is to obtain a perfect variety of colours while using only real colours and not colours simulated by a weft (like it's the case for silver-based emulsion photos). Hewlett Packard was the first to introduce inkjets. At first black & white, they evolved to colour. In 1998, they worked on RET II mode for photo printing which consisted in inserting up to 16 drops of ink in the same point. The RET III contained up to 36 drops in the same pixel. RET III colour print heads utilised 408 injectors (136 by colour) and 300 injectors for black. The shooting frequency was of 18.000 jets per second at maximum. This explains why the UP printers remain in 600 dpi at maximum. Launched in August 2002, RET IV technology is a hybrid technology available on certain HP models. This technology is available by replacing the black cartridge by a 3 colour cartridge (the basic cartridge colour stays in function). The size of the drops goes from 4 to 5 picolitres*. The number of tubes goes from 3 X 136 (RET III) to 6 X 100, that is to say from 3'500 to 1,2 million colours per point. * 1 picolitre is 0.000'000'000'0001 of a litre. As for EPSON, The cartridge contains only ink. Epson increases resolution up to a maximum of 1440 dpi. However, each point only receives one ink drop. Transitions are more moderate with this increased resolution and require however to use adapted paper in order to obtain maximum quality. Epson does not use the same techniques as others since ink injection is done by an electromechanical process named PIEZO. Ejection of ink isn’t processed by heat, but by an electric shock. . Canon has used solely ink cartridges. At present, cartridges are beginning to include electronic components again, just like HP. Ejection of ink is also done by heating it. The solid ink inkjet printer This technology is used by Tektronix (no, this ain't tecktonik..). The 4 inks (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) are initially presented in the shape of wax sticks. When the printer is working, the print head keeps a constant temperature which makes it possible to maintain ink at a liquid state in a chamber compartmentalized tank beside the head. The principle is similar to laser printing as it uses a drum on which ink is deposited. It's the drum which transfers ink on the sheet of paper. Ink is directly solidified when entering in contact with paper. This allows using all kinds of paper. The thermal, sublimation and thermal transfer printer These thermal printers are used only in high quality photograph, in particular in advertisement. Thermal printers use a special paper sensitive to heat. Paper is faded out according to the heat provided by the needles on the head. Sublimation printers use roll-fed paper. The technology is similar to thermal printers. The resolution is limited to 300 dpi but, even with a magnifying glass, the grains are not visible. This solution offers a similar kind of result as the silver-based emulsion photos. Contrarily to thermal photographs (photographs will bleach with the light), the technology used (D2T2, Thermal Dye Diffusion Transfer) allows long-lasting images. With Thermal Dye Diffusion Transfer technology (thermal sublimation), the thermal print head heats three heads which have been covered with, in yellow, magenta and cyan gas. The thermal process makes it possible to transform the dyeing into gas which is diffused in the aspect of a thin layer on the paper. A protective coating is placed above the paper to protect the colour against water and ultra-violets and thus prevents it to lose its glare.
Winlaser laser printers do not have any built-in internal memory. The generic driver is directly provided by Microsoft®. The processor sends the data ready to be printed to the printer. These printers are quite difficult to configure and do not function under DOS. They must be detected during start up. Using the memory and the processor of the PC, they are generally slower. In the same way, certain inkjet printers function only in a DOS opened in a Windows window. The Postscript printer |
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