Personalized Invitations & Stationery; Laser Printing

Xerox introduced the 9700 laser printer in 1978. This was the first commercial laser printer, which was available in the United States first and then later on, replicated all over the world. It had a speed of 120 pages per minute. It is still considered the fastest commercial laser printer. The ‘9700’ was physically huge and carried a large price tag.

Laser printers apply the scientific principle of static electricity. A revolving drum or cylinder develops an electrical charge. A tiny laser beam pointed at the drum discharges the surface in the pattern of the letters and images to be printed, creating a surface with positive and negative areas. The surface is then coated with a toner, a fine powder that is positively charged to attract the negatively charged areas. This is then passed onto the paper, to form the positive image. The paper passes through heated rollers, fusing the toner onto the paper. Color lasers make multiple passes, to mix the different color toners.

The pace and lower operational costs make laser printers profitable for many businesses. The black and white models using black toner are economical and common in many homes and small offices. The color lasers are still too expensive for most consumers. Color lasers can be found at service bureaus and printers and are used to produce high-resolution color digital test copies. Laser printers have their own command and operating system language that translates the digital information in a file into the bitmap images printed on the page.

Adobe PostScript, a command language, capabilities found in many laser printers make them popular with graphic designers and desktop publishers, who often make the most of EPS images and PostScript files. Hewlett-Packard's PCL language is another popular command language used by laser printers.

Laser printers produce high-quality print and are capable of printing an almost unlimited variety of fonts. Most laser printers come with a basic set of fonts. These fonts are called internal or resident fonts and additional fonts can be added in one of two ways stated below:

Font cartridges: Laser printers have slots in which you can insert font cartridges, ROM boards on which fonts have been recorded. The advantage of using font cartridges is that none of the printer's memory is used.

Soft fonts: All laser printers come with a certain amount of RAM memory and you can increase the memory, by adding memory boards in the printer's expansion slots. You can then copy fonts from a disk to the printer's RAM. This is called downloading fonts.

A font that has been downloaded is often referred to as a soft font, to distinguish it from the hard fonts available on font cartridges. Laser printer resolution exists from 300 to 1200 dpi, but specialty printers can reach a remarkable image-setter resolution of 2400 dpi. Options such as duplex printing or printing on both sides, as well as collation, stapling and 3-hole punching is available too.

In addition to text, laser printers are very good for printing graphics. However, you need significant amount of memory in the printer to print high-resolution graphics. To print a full-page graphic at 300 dpi, you would need at least 1 MB, megabyte, of printer RAM. For a 600-dpi graphic, you would need at least 4 MB RAM. This is because laser printers are non-impact printers.

Articles

Articles

– Raised Ink Printing (Thermography Printing)	– Flat Ink Printing
– Embossing & Debossing Printing	– Foil Stamping Printing
– 4 Color Offset Printing	– Offset Lithographic Printing
– Digital Printing	– Digital Duplicator Printing
– Laser Printing	– Inkjet Printing
– Thermal Printing	– Screen Printing
– Engraving Printing	– Printing Resolution Revealed

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