PRINTER

Printer - A device that prints text or illustrations on paper. There are many different types of printers. In terms of the technology utilized, printers fall into the following categories:

Dot matrix: A type of impact printer that produces characters and illustrations by striking pins against an ink ribbon to print closely spaced dots in the appropriate shape. Dot-matrix printers are relatively expensive and do not produce high-quality output. However, they can print to multi-page forms (that is, carbon copies), something laser and ink-jet printers cannot do.

Dot Matrix Printer Manufacturers include Epson, Panasonic, NEC, Okidata and Brother

Dot-matrix printers vary in 3 important characteristics:

Speed: Given in characters per second (cps), the speed can vary from about 50 to over 500 cps. Most dot-matrix printers offer different speeds depending on the quality of print desired.

Print quality: Determined by the number of pins (the mechanisms that print the dots), it can vary from 9 to 24. The best dot-matrix printers (24 pins) can produce near letter-quality type, although you can still see a difference if you look closely.

Ink: Dot Matrix Printer use ribbon for ink
In addition to these characteristics, you should also consider the noise factor. Compared to laser and ink-jet printers, dot-matrix printers are notorious for making a lot of noise.

Ink-jet: A type of printer that works by spraying ionized ink at a sheet of paper. Magnetized plates in the ink's path direct the ink onto the paper in the desired shapes. Ink-jet printers are capable of producing high quality print approaching that produced by laser printers. A typical ink-jet printer provides a resolution of 600 dots per inch, although some newer models offer higher resolutions.


Ink Jet Printer Manufacturers include Canon, Epson, HP and Lexmark

Speed: Given in Pages per Minute (PPM) the higher the PPM the more pages they can print. Most ink-jet printers offer different speeds depending on the quality of print desired.

Print quality: Determined by the DPI Dot Per Inch Example 2440 x 1220 DPI (Vertical and Horizontal DPI) The higher the DPI the better in terms of print quality.

Ink: Ink-Jet Printers use Ink Cartridges (hidden cost)
In general, the price of ink-jet printers is lower than that of laser printers. However, they are also considerably slower. Another drawback of ink-jet printers is that they require a special type of ink that is apt to smudge on inexpensive copier paper. Because ink-jet printers require smaller mechanical parts than laser printers, they are especially popular as portable printers. In addition, color ink-jet printers provide an inexpensive way to print full-color documents.

Laser: A type of printer that utilizes a laser beam to produce an image on a drum. The light of the laser alters the electrical charge on the drum wherever it hits. The drum is then rolled through a reservoir of toner, which is picked up by the charged portions of the drum. Finally, the toner is transferred to the paper through a combination of heat and pressure. This is also the way copy machines work.


Laser Printer Manufacturers include HP, Lexmark, NEC, Xerox and Ricoh

Speed: Given in Pages per Minute (PPM) the higher the PPM the more pages they can print. Most ink-jet printers offer different speeds depending on the quality of print desired.

Print quality: Determined by the DPI Dot Per Inch Example 4880 x 2440 DPI (Vertical and Horizontal DPI)

Ink: Laser Printers use Toner Cartridges
Laser Printer Parts
• Toner Cartridge Components
• EP Photosensitive Drum
• Erase Lamp
• Primary Corona Wire
• Toner
• Transfer Corona
• Fuser
• Power Supplies
• Turning Gears
• Motherboard
• Ozone Filter
• Sensors
• Switches

Because an entire page is transmitted to a drum before the toner is applied, laser printers are sometimes called page printers. There are two other types of page printers that fall under the category of laser printers even though they do not use lasers at all. One uses an array of LEDs to expose the drum, and the other uses LCD's. Once the drum is charged, however, they both operate like a real laser printer.

One of the chief characteristics of laser printers is their resolution -- how many dots per inch (dpi) they lay down. The available resolutions range from 300 dpi at the low end to 1,200 dpi at the high end. By comparison, offset printing usually prints at 1,200 or 2,400 dpi. Some laser printers achieve higher resolutions with special techniques known generally as resolution enhancement.

In addition to the standard monochrome laser printer, which uses a single toner, there also exist color laser printers that use four toners to print in full color. Color laser printers tend to be about five to ten times as expensive as their monochrome siblings.

Laser printers produce very high-quality print and are capable of printing an almost unlimited variety of fonts. Most laser printers come with a basic set of fonts, called internal or resident fonts, but you can add additional fonts in one of two ways

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

Soft fonts: All laser printers come with a certain amount of RAM memory, and you can usually increase the amount of 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. The more RAM a printer has, the more fonts that can be downloaded at one time.

In addition to text, laser printers are very adept at printing graphics. However, you need significant amounts of memory in the printer to print high-resolution graphics. To print a full-page graphic at 300 dpi, for example, you need at least 1 MB (megabyte) of printer RAM. For a 600-dpi graphic, you need at least 4 MB RAM.

Because laser printers are no impact printers, they are much quieter than dot matrix. They are also relatively fast, although not as fast as some dot-matrix printers. The speed of laser printers ranges from about 4 to 20 pages of text per minute (ppm). A typical rate of 6 ppm is equivalent to about 40 characters per second (cps).

Laser printers are controlled through page description languages (PDL's). There are two de facto standards for PDL's:

PCL: Hewlett-Packard (HP) was one of the pioneers of laser printers and has developed a Printer Control Language (PCL) to control output. There are several versions of PCL, so a printer may be compatible with one but not another. In addition, many printers that claim compatibility cannot accept HP font cartridges.

PostScript: This is the de facto standard for Apple Macintosh printers and for all desktop publishing systems.

Most software can print using either of this PDL's. PostScript tends to be a bit more expensive, but it has some features that PCL lacks and it is the standard for desktop publishing. Some printers support both PCL and PostScript.

The 6 steps laser printing process



NOTE * easy way to remember this is CLEAN CARS WILL DRIVE TO FAST

1. Cleaning – The Photosensitive drum is cleaned before it can take on a new image

2. Conditioning or Charging – To make the drum receptive to new images, it must be charged. The EP drum is given a negative charge by the primary corona wire around -600 and -1000 volts

3. Writing - A laser beam is use to write to the EP drum causing dots on the drum to lose some of the negative chargeand become relatively positive charge

4. Developing - A toner is transferred from the toner cylinder to the EP drum by attracting the area of the drum that has a Relative positive charge

5. Transferring - The transfer corona wire puts a highly positive charge on the paper once the paper has a positive chargethe negatively charge toner particle leaps from the drum into the paper

6. Fusing - The compression roller and fusing roller press and melts the toner into the paper the fuser gets very hot

Other Types of Printers

Photo Printer – Is a type of printer use for printing photographs.

Dye-Sublimation Printer – Is a type of printer which employs a printing process that uses heat to transfer dye to a medium such as a plastic card, printer paper or poster paper.

Thermal Printer- Is a type of printer that produces a printed image by selectively heating coated thermo chromic paper, or thermal paper as it is commonly known, when the paper passes over the thermal print head. The coating turns black in the areas where it is heated which then produce an image.

Types of Printer Cables

USB – Standard USB Printer Cable speed is around 12Mbps.



Parallel – IEEE 1284 Standard Cable speed is around 1.5 to 2.77Mbps

IEEE 1284 standard supported the following:

Supports 5 modes of operation (Compatibility, Nibble Mode, Byte Mode, EPP and ECP)

Supported a standard physical interface
Supported impedance and termination
Supported a standard method of connecting a host PC and peripheral device

Serial – RS232 Standard Printer Cable speed is around 57Kbps

Printer ConnectionsNetwork, or commonly Ethernet, connections are commonplace on network laser printers, though some other types of printers do employ this type of connection. Generally, network printers are designed to be shared using a central file/print server, though you can share them off a workstation in a “workgroup” environment.


RJ45


Parallel is the original standard for printers and a lot of basic printers still rely on the parallel port connection. A parallel (also called LPT port) sends and receives data simultaneously, transmitting data in parallel. Parallel uses a DB25 connection on the computer side and an oddly shaped 36 pin connection on the printer called the centronics port.




USB, or Universal Serial Bus, is a very common connector type for personal printers being sold today. USB is sold as the next generation of standard ports for computers. USB allows mice, keyboards, scanners, printers, most peripherals to connect to a computer. It supports up to 12 Mbps transfer rate and is hot swappable.
USB_A

USB_B

Infrared is not very commonly used. An Infrared acceptor allows your devices (laptops, PDAs, Cameras, etc) connect to the printer and send print commands via infrared signals.Serial allows your printer to connect to your computer via the serial port.

Firewire is a high speed connection commonly referred to as IEEE1394, its “standard”. Though not specifically mentioned in the preparation outline for the exam, you should be aware that a printer may connect via Firewire. Firewire is a high speed connection typically used for digital video editing or other high bandwidth requirements.
6pin Firewire port
Wireless connection such as Bluetooth is also popular for connecting printers in a network environment

An HP Jet direct (or Printer Server Box) is a device which allows a non-networkable printer to be networked. For example, we have an Epson color inkjet printer in our office which has a standard parallel port connection on it. The Jet Direct box allows the printer to be connected into our network and allows the printer to be shared off of our file/print server.

Scanner – A device use to scan text and images.


Types of scanners
Nowadays there are different types of scanners depending on user’s purposes. Find below the most common and used scanners that can be found in the market:

Drum scanners
Drum scanners capture image information with photomultiplier tubes (PMT) rather than the charged coupled device (CCD) arrays found in flatbed scanners and inexpensive film scanners.

Flatbed scanner
A flatbed scanner is usually composed of a glass pane (or platen), under which there is a bright light (often xenon or cold cathode fluorescent) which illuminates the pane, and a moving optical array, whether CCD or CIS. Color scanners typically contain three rows (arrays) of sensors with red, green, and blue filters. Images to be scanned are placed face down on the glass and the sensor array and light source move across the pane reading the entire area. An image is therefore visible to the charge-coupled device only because of the light it reflects. Transparent images do not work in this way, and require special accessories that illuminate them from the upper side.

Hand scanner
Hand scanners are manual devices which are dragged across the surface of the image to be scanned. Scanning documents in this manner requires a steady hand, as an uneven scanning rate would produce distorted images. They typically have a "start" button which is held by the user for the duration of the scan, some switches to set the optical resolution, and a roller which generates a clock pulse for synchronization with the computer. Most hand scanners were monochrome and produced light from an array of green LEDs to illuminate the image. A typical hand scanner also had a small window through which the document being scanned could be viewed

You will now learn how to install a printer in Windows 2K/XP Environment
How to Install a Printer

Procedure Reference: Install a Local Printer

To install a printer that is attached to the local computer:

1. From the Start menu, choose Settings>Printers\Printer and Faxes to open the Printers dialog box.

2. Double-click the Add Printer icon to start the Add Printer Wizard.

3. Click Next.

4. Select Local Printer.

5. Click Next. (if USB printer it will do a PnP detection)

6. Click Next.

7. From the Available Ports list box, select the port your printer is connected on.

?In most cases, this will be an LPT# port.

8. Click Next.

9. From the Manufacturers list box, select the manufacturer of your printer.

10. From the Printers list box, select the model of your printer

11. In the Printer Name text box, type a name for your printer.

12. Under Do You Want Your Windows-based Programs To Use This Printer As The Default Printer, select one of the following:

?You’ll be prompted as to whether you want to make this printer the default printer only if you have other printers defined in the Printers folder. If this is the first printer in the Printers folder, Windows automatically makes the printer the default printer.

• Yes, if you want all Windows programs to use this printer as their default printer.• No, if you want this printer available to Windows programs to use, but it is not their default printer.

13. Click Next.14. Do not share this printer or share name (if you want to share your printer for networking put the share name of the printer that you’ve just installed15. Location: \\computer_name\share_name (this is what we called the UNC universal naming convention)
16. Do you want to print a test page select one of the following:

• Yes, (Recommended), if you want to print a test page to verify the printer is set up properly.• No, if you want to skip printing the test page.

17. Click Finish.

18. Close the Printers window.

To install a printer that is shared on the network:

1. Log on to Windows with a user account and password that is valid for the print server.

2. From the Start menu, choose Settings>Printers\Printer and faxes to open the printer dialog box

3. Double-click the Add Printer icon to start the Add Printer Wizard.

4. Click Next.

5. Select Network Printer.

6. Click Next.

7. Browse for a printer or location: \\computer_name\share_name (UNC) Universal Naming Convention

8. next
Install a Scanner in a Windows Environment

1. Attach the power to the Scanner

2. Attach the USB or Parallel Cable to the back of the Scanner

3. Install the Driver of the Scanner

4. Configure Options and Default Settings

5. Print/Scan Test Page

6. Verify compatibility with the OS and Applications

7. Start Scanning General Printer Troubleshooting Issues
Print Job Never Prints – Check connection, it is plugged in, printer online, AC outlet, cables, does it have paper and spoolerProblems with Feed Mechanisms – Either user error or too much paperSpooler Problems – Print Directly to PrinterCrazy Characters or Code – Driver Issues with Printer or loose printer cableWrong Settings – Check settings and use correct paperLow Ink and Toner – Replace the Ink and Toner cartridge immediatelyConnection Errors – LPT error, COM error and USB cannot detect PnPNo Printout – Check ribbon, toner cartridge or ink cartridgesOut of Paper Errors – No paper in the printerMaintenance, Alignment and Settings – Right Click Printer Icon and click on propertiesNetworking problems – rights, permissions, network connectionsPrinter Hardware Failure – unless it’s a high end laser printer it’s better to replace and get a new one

Input/output Errors
This happens when the computer is unable to communicate with the printer:
Is the printer plugged in?Is the printer turned on?Check the cable connection?Is the printer driver installed?Is there any system resource conflict (IRQ or DMA)?

Dot Matrix Printer Troubleshooting
No Printout – Check RibbonBad Looking Text, White bars or Chopped Text – Print HeadSmudges or Dirty Printout – Clean Platen with denatured alcoholUneven Printout – Adjust Platen

Ink-Jet Print Quality Issues
Unclear Images – Running low on ink and needs to be replacedBlank Printouts – No Ink or Nozzle is cloggedSmudges on Printouts – User Error (touch the printout before the ink is dried)Wrong Colors in Printouts – Low Ink or Dirty NozzleAlignment Issues – Check printer properties and run the alignment program

Laser Printer Troubleshooting
Unlike with PCs, laser printer maintenance follows a fairly well established procedure. Follow these steps to insure a long, healthy life for your system.
Keeping it CleanLaser printers are quite robust as a rule. A good cleaning every time you replace the toner cartridge will help that printer last for many years. .

Periodic
Although keeping the printer clean is critical to its health and well being, every laser printer has certain components that will need to be replaced periodically. Your ultimate source for determining the parts that need to be replaced (and when to replace them) is the printer manufacturer. Following the manufacturer’s maintenance guidelines will help to ensure years of trouble-free, dependable printing from your laser printer.Some ozone filters may be cleaned with a vacuum and some can only be replaced-follow the manufacturer’s recommendation. The fuser assembly may be cleaned with 90 percent or better denatured alcohol. Check the heat roller (the Teflon coated one with the light bulb inside) for pits and scratches. If there is surface damage on the rollers, replace the fuser unit. Most printers will give you an error code when the fuser is damaged or overheating and needs to be replaced; others will produce the error code at a preset copy count as a preventative maintenance measure. Again, follow the manufacturer’s recommendations. The transfer corona can be cleaned with 90 percent denatured alcohol on a cotton swab. If the wire is broken, you can replace it; many just snap in, or are held in by a couple of screws. Paper guides can also be cleaned with alcohol on a fibrous towel.

Laser Printer Problems
Blank Paper - Blank sheets of paper usually mean the printer is out of toner or transfer corona wire Black Paper – primary corona wire Dirty Printouts – Clean Printer and Fuser using maintenance programGhosting, Vertical White Lines, Blotchy Print or No Printout usually you need to shake the tonerPaper Jams – To much paper, misalignment, wrong paper and check sensors if no paper causing paper jamPulling Multiple SheetsIf the printer grabs multiple sheets at a time, first try opening a new ream of paper and loading that in the printer. If that works, you’ve got a humidity problem. If the new paper angle doesn’t work, check the separation pad on the printer. The separation pad is a small piece of cork or rubber that separates the sheets as they are pulled from the paper feed tray. A worn separation pad will look shiny and well, worn! Most separation pads are easy to replace. Warped, Overprinted, or Poorly Formed Characters Poorly formed characters can indicate either a problem with the paper (or other media), or a problem with the hardware. Wavy Image – Defective Laser Scanner Strange Sizes – User mistake (printer settings) or wrong paperReverse Power Up – Turn on Laser Printer first before you turn on PC

Troubleshooting Scanners
the main problem with scanners is usually the parallel port itself. If you do not have the port configured correctly in the BIOS you can run into problems scanning. Another problem is simply the software. Some of the software bundles are a little less than desirable. If so try uninstalling software and reinstalling it again. This can help any corrupted files and drivers. I will explain how to do both below.BIOSTake a peek into your BIOS. This is done usually by hitting the delete key while boot up. Make sure and hit it while the memory is counting so not to make it to windows. When in BIOS look at some of your system resources for the parallel port. You may want to set this port for bi-directional. This can help with your problems. Also note that trying to use the printer and scanner at the same time will not work. If this seems to be a problem get a parallel switch. Look for the Belkin brand.Uninstall and InstallNow if you want to try re-installing the software you can do it in two ways. You can uninstall the old software or simply go through the scanners setup program again. This is preferred so not to lose valuable data you may have. Make sure your scanners software is in the CD-Drive prior to installing. 1. Go to start button and click settings 2. click control panel 3. click add/remove programs 4. choose scanner software in list to remove or choose install at top of display to reinstall scanner software 5. simply choose the D:\ or CD-ROM drive and hit next 6. this will usually bring up a setup.exe 7. install program 8. if asked to reboot, do so. If you couldn't get it to work this way you can try it manually by using the Run command under the start button. If still lost on this one refer to the documentation of scanner.Drivers Make sure your scanner has the right and up to date driver installed
System Resources Problems- Make sure there are no IRQ or DMA conflicts