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Laser Printers

This type of printer uses a laser beam to produce a latent image on a drum. This laser beam is reflected by a mirror, wich is spinned by a motor. The laser beam alters the electrical charge on the drum, while it is rolled through a reserve of toner. The toner is picked up by the charged portions of the drum, and transferred to the paper. The image or text is then print on the paper through a combination of heat and pressure.

Also, there is another type of laser printer called Light Emitting Diode (LED). This printer uses an array of LED instead of a mirror. LED doesn't use a mirror, it writes directly to the drum making it a little more faster.

The resolution of these printers ranges from 300dpi at the low end to 1,200dpi at the high end. Some laser printers achieve higher resolutions with special techniques known generally as resolution enhancement.

Laser printers are capable of printing a variety of fonts. Most of them come with a basic set of fonts, but you can add it by buying a module known as ROM. This modules come with a set of fonts that you can insert in one of the printer's slots. You can also download fonts from your PC to the printer's memory. To do this you have to check how much memory the printer has. Not only the amount of memory will be use to download fonts, also will be use to print high resolution graphics.

The speed of laser printers is measured in pages per minute (ppm). Now days the speed ranges from 10ppm at low end to 65ppm at high end. For color laser printers ranges from 8ppm, printing in color, and 8ppm, printing in monochrome, at low end to 36ppm, printing in color, and 40ppm, printing in monochrome, at high end.

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

• Printer Control Language (PCL)

  Developed by HP to control output. There are several versions of PCL.

• PostScript

  Developed by Adobe Systems for printing documents and images on laser printers.

  Some printers support both PCL and PostScript.