Chapter 21 Inkjet Printers, Impact Printers, and Thermal Printers

Ink Cartridges

These are used by inkjet printers to hold different colors of ink for the printer.

Ribbon

This internal component of an impact printer is usually made out of cloth and physically touches the paper being printed on. When ink is shot out of the pinheads of an impact printer this cloth is what catches the ink and deposits the raw data on a paper.

Thermal Transfer Printer

This is the newer of the two types of thermal printers. This type of printer uses a ribbon that contains wax-based ink. The heating element in this type of printer melts the ribbon (also called foil) onto special thermal paper. This type of printer is used for printing receipts, bar code labels, clothing labels, or container labels.

Direct Thermal Printer

This is the older of the two types of thermal printers. This printer burns dots onto special coated paper called thermal paper much like a fax machine, and as such, requires no ink or ribbon for printing. This type of a printer is largely used for printing receipts.

Print Head

This is used by an inkjet printer to print one line at a time of an image with each clean pass.

Inkjet Printer

This type of a printer uses a type of ink-dispersion printing method and doesn't normally provide the high-quality resolution of laser printers.

Impact Printer

This type of printer creates a printed page by using some mechanism that touches the paper. The best known printer of this type is a dot matrix printer, which prints only raw data. While these printers have mostly become obsolete, they are still useful for printing on tractor feeds (a continuous print job for large amounts of data), and can use carbon paper to print multiple copies at the same time.

Thermal Printer

This type of printer uses heat to create an image. There are two types of this type of printer; a direct thermal printer, and a thermal transfer printer.