What types of printers are there, and what are their advantages and disadvantages?
When it comes to printers, there’s only 4 common variations of printer around nowadays: dot matrix, inkjet, laserjet and plotters. Dot matrix printers have been around since time itself began (or at least that’s how it feels!), and they involve small pins in the printer head that physically stamp the ink onto the page. Checkout tills have them, ATM machines have them – they’re cheap and fairly reliable, just slow and pretty noisy. And very old technology nowadays. VERY old. Inkjet printers are the ones that are most viable financially to the home user – you have a cartridge (the amount of cartridges depends on if your printer’s just black & white, or colour and black & white – and some colour inkjects have separate cartridges for each colour too) full of ink. The nozzle in the printer head is fed ink from the cartridge(s) and sprays a fine mist of said ink onto the page. Some early inkjet printers printed the entire page once in colour (sometimes doing it three times for each colour) t
Again I see a example of technology advanced far in a specific area (printers) and still a dinosaur ( dot-matrix ) is still here. It also is here for the “long haul” since non of the new technology can match the speed of dot-matrix when it comes printing the widely used paper used for making carbon copies of 2 or more. In fact nothing can print like that. I have seen banks go through so many upgrades and they use flat slim monitors and other new tech stuff, but that dot-matrix is still there (shaking the making loud noise randomly and taking your print job out involved a ripping of paper. They are insulated with asphalt sound proofing material! Although not printer related, This second example supports the idea that the job is more important that getting the best that technology can offer. This was a good question to answer. The other “dinosaur is the car battery “lead acid, invented by a Frenchman in another century”. Batteries have advanced in leaps and bounds, but the old car batter
