La elección del motor de compresión tiene un efecto substancial en los trabajos a los que una impresora está destinada. Hay diferentes tecnologías que tienen diferentes niveles de calidad de imagen, velocidad de impresión, coste, ruido y además, algunas tecnologías son inapropiadas para ciertos tipos de medios físicos (como papel carbón o transparencias).

Otro aspecto de la tecnología de impresión que es frecuentemente olvidado es la resistencia a la alteración: la tinta líquida como de una cabeza de inyección de tinta es absorbida por las fibras del papel, y por eso los documentos impresos con tinta líquida son más difíciles de alterar que los que están impresos por tóner o tinta sólida, que no penetran por debajo de la superficie del papel.

Toner

Laser printers and thermal printers use this method to adhere toner to the media. They work using the principle of xerography that is at work in most photocopiers: adhering toner to a light-sensitive printing drum, and using static electricity to transfer the toner to the printing medium to which it binds thanks to heat and pressure.

Laser printers are known for their high-quality printing, good print speed, and low cost per copy; They are the most common printers for many general-purpose office applications. They are less used by the consumer, generally due to their high initial cost. Laser printers are available in both color and monochrome.

The advent of reasonably priced precision lasers has made the toner-based monochrome printer dominant in office applications. Another type of toner-based printer is the LED printer which uses a collection of LEDs instead of lasers to cause toner to adhere to the printing drum. Toner, also called dry ink by functional analogy with ink, is a fine powder, usually black, that is deposited on the paper to be printed by means of electrostatic attraction (from English, toner).

Inkjet

Inkjet printers (Ink Jet) spray very small amounts of ink into the medium, usually a few picoliters. For color applications, including photo printing, inkjet methods are dominant, as high-quality printers are inexpensive to produce. Virtually all inkjet printers are color devices; Some, known as photo printers, include extra pigments for better reproduction of the color gamut needed for high-quality photo printing (and are additionally capable of printing on photo paper, as opposed to regular office paper).

There are two methods to inject the ink:

solid ink

Solid ink printers, also called phase change printers, are a type of thermal transfer printer but use solid sticks of CMYK color ink (similar in consistency to candle wax). The ink melts and feeds a print head operated by a piezoelectric crystal (for example quartz). The head distributes the ink onto an oiled drum. The paper then passes over the drum as the image is transferred to the paper.

They are commonly used as color printers in offices, as they are excellent at printing transparencies and other non-porous media, and can achieve great results. The acquisition and use costs are similar to laser printers.

The disadvantages of this technology are high energy consumption and long waiting periods (warming up) of the machine. There are also some users who complain that solid ink prints are difficult to write on (wax tends to repel ink from pens), and they are difficult to feed paper automatically, although these traits have been significantly reduced in recent models. Additionally, this type of printer can only be obtained from a single manufacturer, Xerox, as part of its Xerox Phaser line of office printers. Solid ink printers were previously manufactured by Tektronix, but it sold its printing division to

Impact

Impact printers or slam printers rely on impact force to transfer ink to the medium, similar to typewriters, they are generally limited to reproducing text. At the time they dominated quality printing. There are two main types:

Impact printers work with a head in which there are needles, these needles hit a ribbon, similar to that of a typewriter, which generates the impression of the letter.

In the general sense, many printers are based on an array of many pixels or dots that together form the larger image. However, the term matrix or dot is used specifically for impact printers that use an array of small pins to create precise dots. These printers are known as matrix printers. The advantage of dot matrix over other impact printers is that they can produce graphic images as well as text. However, text is generally of poorer quality than type impact-based printers.

Some sub-classifications of dot matrix printers are ballistic wire printers and stored energy printers.

Dot matrix printers can be either character-based or line-based, depending on the print head configuration.

dye sublimation

Dye sublimation printers employ a printing process that uses heat to transfer ink to media such as plastic cards, paper, or canvas. The process usually consists of adding one color at a time using a tape that has panels of color. These printers are primarily intended for high-quality color applications, including color photography, and are less suitable for text. First used in copy shops, they are increasingly being targeted at photo printer consumers.

Thermal

Thermal printers are based on a series of hot needles that run through heat-sensitive paper that turns black upon contact. Due to their low cost, they are widely used in ATMs and supermarkets.

Printers carry internal memory. They range from 6 KB in dot matrix printers to at least 2 MB in laser printers.

Currently, lasers sell independent memory modules to expand its capacity.

Memory is used as a buffer and as permanent and semi-permanent storage. Furthermore, its use is necessary because the processing of vector graphics and the design of bitmap fonts consume memory.

The buffer is used to hold active print jobs and the permanence is used to store font layout and data.

The connection of the printer with the computer has been evolving, leading to improved printing performance and user comfort.

The oldest form of connection was through a serial port where the transfer was done bit by bit, allowing long distances with slow speeds that did not exceed 19,200 bytes/second.

It rose to the parallel port connection in which transfers were byte by byte, allowing 8 parallel connections, achieving a faster speed between ½ MB/second and 4 MB/second. The drawback was the limitation of the distance of the cable that connects the printer to the computer since it does not allow a length greater than 2 meters.

Another form of connection was achieved by putting the printer on an Ethernet network using RJ-45 connections based on the IEEE 802.3 standard.

The speeds achieved exceed 10 Mb/second based on packet handling. Do not confuse it with a shared printer, since network printers operate as a network element with its own IP address.

Another more current connection method is through USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports. The speed improves again with 480Mb/second with the advantages that come with the USB port: compatibility with various systems and the possibility of using it on portable devices.

Finally, the Wi-Fi wireless connection, through the IEEE 802.11 protocol, is being the newest. It reaches 300 Mb/second and works for ink, laser or multifunction printers.

Although it achieves less speed than those connected by USB, Wi-Fi provides advantages such as autonomy, mobility and freedom of the user without the use of cables. For correct use and to avoid unwanted access, we must encrypt the network.

A “page description language” (PDL) is a means of encoding each element of a document so that it can be transmitted to the printer for printing. It is the medium that defines the characteristics and composition that would describe a printed document within a data flow. There are several types of PDL:

It was created by Apple to not be technologically dependent on Adobe's PostScript fonts, but its quality turned out to be inferior. It was bought by Microsoft which has contributed to it not disappearing. The main strength of TrueType is that it offers font designers a large degree of control over how their fonts are displayed at different sizes.

The problem with most programs is that they don't normally use truetype. In general they load the sources in Postscript style and all insinuations are discarded; This is a big loss for sources with high quality. Aside from font design, there are two other keys to font quality to consider: character profile and insinuation. Only a few foundries currently produce fonts that fully exploit truetype's innuendo potential. There are now applications that convert a Type 1 of Postscript into a truetype, but the scripts are better than the automatically generated ones.

Plotters are used to make drawing impressions of architectural, engineering, industrial design plans, etc., for printing sheets, posters, photographic enlargements, billboards, signs on routes, public roads, signage, etc. There are two types of plotters depending on the use of their inks, water-based or solvent-based. A particular case is the cutting plotter, which cuts an adhesive medium that will then be fixed to another surface, from t-shirts to car bodies.

There are devices such as cell phones, which are used in photographic development houses or at home. These devices are usually known as photo printers, photo-quality printers, or photo printing bases. These devices print in color, producing images that mimic the range of colors and resolutions of photographic developing methods prior to this technology.

A menudo se utiliza el modelo comercial de las maquinillas y las cuchillas de afeitar en el negocio de las impresoras. Las compañías pueden vender una impresora por debajo de su coste, y obtener beneficios de los cartuchos de tinta, papel u otras partes que se reemplazan. Esto ha causado disputas legales respecto al derecho de otras compañías distintas al fabricante de la impresora de vender cartuchos de tinta compatibles o alternativos. Para proteger al modelo comercial de las maquinillas y las cuchillas de afeitar muchos fabricantes invierten considerables sumas en desarrollo de nuevas tecnologías y sus patentes.

Otros fabricantes, en reacción a los desafíos que trae este modelo comercial, apuntan a obtener mayores beneficios de las impresoras y menos de los cartuchos de tinta, promoviendo los menores precios de los cartuchos a través de campañas de publicidad. Esto genera dos propuestas bien diferentes: "impresora barata - tinta cara" o "impresora cara - tinta barata". Finalmente, la decisión del consumidor depende de su tasa de interés de referencia o su preferencia intertemporal.[3]​[4]​.

Renting as a model for companies

In the corporate sphere, printer leasing has emerged as an alternative to the traditional model. This system allows companies, SMEs and freelancers to outsource printer management through periodic payments, freeing up resources for strategic activities. The model typically includes:.

Contracts typically last 24 to 60 months, converting capital expenditures (CAPEX) into operating expenses (OPEX) with deductible tax advantages. Manufacturers such as Ricoh, Kyocera or Xerox offer these services, where the benefit no longer comes mainly from consumables, but from the comprehensive management of the printing park. This model also extends to photocopiers and professional production equipment.[5][6][7]​.

Tanto los cartuchos, como la tinta y el papel son 3 elementos imprescindibles para poder realizar copias con una impresora, y el saber escoger el elemento más adecuado en función del tipo de impresión que se pretende realizar puede aumentar el rendimiento de nuestra impresora hasta límites insospechados.

Cartridges

In the case of laser printers, the life of the cartridge depends on the amount of toner it contains and when the toner runs out, the cartridge must be replaced. If the cartridge and the OPC (sensitive photoconductive organ) are in separate compartments, when the toner runs out, only the cartridge is replaced, but if the OPC is inside the cartridge, both must be changed, considerably increasing the expense. The situation is more critical in the case of color laser printers.

In inkjet printers, the useful life of the cartridge depends on the life of the ink, although many cartridges can be refilled, which helps reduce the expense of buying a new one, although excessive use of a cartridge can cause lower quality prints.

Ink

There are two types of ink for printers:

The objective of every manufacturer of printer inks is that their inks can print on any medium and to this end they develop new types of ink with different chemical compositions almost daily.

Paper

Currently, when you want to make a high-quality copy on a printer, you have to use high-quality glossy paper. This paper is quite expensive and if you want to make many copies in photographic quality, the cost would be very high. Therefore, manufacturers are developing new printers that allow you to obtain high-quality prints on plain paper.

Some manufacturers, such as Epson, make their own paper.

Problems with paper

If you are not careful when selecting the right type of paper for the printer or when loading the paper, small problems can occur. Poor placement of the paper may result in the printer not detecting the paper, so simply reposition it correctly. This poor placement or poor choice of paper can also lead to a jam occurring during printing because the printer has taken several sheets at the same time, so you must be careful when placing the paper in the tray and you should not overload this tray with a lot of paper.

ink problems

Sometimes when printing documents or photographs, horizontal bands may appear that worsen the quality of the print. Although this problem can occasionally be related to a poor choice of printing paper it is usually due to ink problems in inkjet prints. One possible cause is the print quality settings, since the document may require a higher quality setting on the printer. Other possible causes could be that the cartridge is running out of ink or that the printheads are dirty.

Some other types of printers are important for historical reasons or for special uses, among them are the following:.

La elección del motor de compresión tiene un efecto substancial en los trabajos a los que una impresora está destinada. Hay diferentes tecnologías que tienen diferentes niveles de calidad de imagen, velocidad de impresión, coste, ruido y además, algunas tecnologías son inapropiadas para ciertos tipos de medios físicos (como papel carbón o transparencias).

Otro aspecto de la tecnología de impresión que es frecuentemente olvidado es la resistencia a la alteración: la tinta líquida como de una cabeza de inyección de tinta es absorbida por las fibras del papel, y por eso los documentos impresos con tinta líquida son más difíciles de alterar que los que están impresos por tóner o tinta sólida, que no penetran por debajo de la superficie del papel.

Toner

Laser printers and thermal printers use this method to adhere toner to the media. They work using the principle of xerography that is at work in most photocopiers: adhering toner to a light-sensitive printing drum, and using static electricity to transfer the toner to the printing medium to which it binds thanks to heat and pressure.

Laser printers are known for their high-quality printing, good print speed, and low cost per copy; They are the most common printers for many general-purpose office applications. They are less used by the consumer, generally due to their high initial cost. Laser printers are available in both color and monochrome.

The advent of reasonably priced precision lasers has made the toner-based monochrome printer dominant in office applications. Another type of toner-based printer is the LED printer which uses a collection of LEDs instead of lasers to cause toner to adhere to the printing drum. Toner, also called dry ink by functional analogy with ink, is a fine powder, usually black, that is deposited on the paper to be printed by means of electrostatic attraction (from English, toner).

Inkjet

Inkjet printers (Ink Jet) spray very small amounts of ink into the medium, usually a few picoliters. For color applications, including photo printing, inkjet methods are dominant, as high-quality printers are inexpensive to produce. Virtually all inkjet printers are color devices; Some, known as photo printers, include extra pigments for better reproduction of the color gamut needed for high-quality photo printing (and are additionally capable of printing on photo paper, as opposed to regular office paper).

There are two methods to inject the ink:

solid ink

Solid ink printers, also called phase change printers, are a type of thermal transfer printer but use solid sticks of CMYK color ink (similar in consistency to candle wax). The ink melts and feeds a print head operated by a piezoelectric crystal (for example quartz). The head distributes the ink onto an oiled drum. The paper then passes over the drum as the image is transferred to the paper.

They are commonly used as color printers in offices, as they are excellent at printing transparencies and other non-porous media, and can achieve great results. The acquisition and use costs are similar to laser printers.

The disadvantages of this technology are high energy consumption and long waiting periods (warming up) of the machine. There are also some users who complain that solid ink prints are difficult to write on (wax tends to repel ink from pens), and they are difficult to feed paper automatically, although these traits have been significantly reduced in recent models. Additionally, this type of printer can only be obtained from a single manufacturer, Xerox, as part of its Xerox Phaser line of office printers. Solid ink printers were previously manufactured by Tektronix, but it sold its printing division to

Impact

Impact printers or slam printers rely on impact force to transfer ink to the medium, similar to typewriters, they are generally limited to reproducing text. At the time they dominated quality printing. There are two main types:

Impact printers work with a head in which there are needles, these needles hit a ribbon, similar to that of a typewriter, which generates the impression of the letter.

In the general sense, many printers are based on an array of many pixels or dots that together form the larger image. However, the term matrix or dot is used specifically for impact printers that use an array of small pins to create precise dots. These printers are known as matrix printers. The advantage of dot matrix over other impact printers is that they can produce graphic images as well as text. However, text is generally of poorer quality than type impact-based printers.

Some sub-classifications of dot matrix printers are ballistic wire printers and stored energy printers.

Dot matrix printers can be either character-based or line-based, depending on the print head configuration.

dye sublimation

Dye sublimation printers employ a printing process that uses heat to transfer ink to media such as plastic cards, paper, or canvas. The process usually consists of adding one color at a time using a tape that has panels of color. These printers are primarily intended for high-quality color applications, including color photography, and are less suitable for text. First used in copy shops, they are increasingly being targeted at photo printer consumers.

Thermal

Thermal printers are based on a series of hot needles that run through heat-sensitive paper that turns black upon contact. Due to their low cost, they are widely used in ATMs and supermarkets.

Printers carry internal memory. They range from 6 KB in dot matrix printers to at least 2 MB in laser printers.

Currently, lasers sell independent memory modules to expand its capacity.

Memory is used as a buffer and as permanent and semi-permanent storage. Furthermore, its use is necessary because the processing of vector graphics and the design of bitmap fonts consume memory.

The buffer is used to hold active print jobs and the permanence is used to store font layout and data.

The connection of the printer with the computer has been evolving, leading to improved printing performance and user comfort.

The oldest form of connection was through a serial port where the transfer was done bit by bit, allowing long distances with slow speeds that did not exceed 19,200 bytes/second.

It rose to the parallel port connection in which transfers were byte by byte, allowing 8 parallel connections, achieving a faster speed between ½ MB/second and 4 MB/second. The drawback was the limitation of the distance of the cable that connects the printer to the computer since it does not allow a length greater than 2 meters.

Another form of connection was achieved by putting the printer on an Ethernet network using RJ-45 connections based on the IEEE 802.3 standard.

The speeds achieved exceed 10 Mb/second based on packet handling. Do not confuse it with a shared printer, since network printers operate as a network element with its own IP address.

Another more current connection method is through USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports. The speed improves again with 480Mb/second with the advantages that come with the USB port: compatibility with various systems and the possibility of using it on portable devices.

Finally, the Wi-Fi wireless connection, through the IEEE 802.11 protocol, is being the newest. It reaches 300 Mb/second and works for ink, laser or multifunction printers.

Although it achieves less speed than those connected by USB, Wi-Fi provides advantages such as autonomy, mobility and freedom of the user without the use of cables. For correct use and to avoid unwanted access, we must encrypt the network.

A “page description language” (PDL) is a means of encoding each element of a document so that it can be transmitted to the printer for printing. It is the medium that defines the characteristics and composition that would describe a printed document within a data flow. There are several types of PDL:

It was created by Apple to not be technologically dependent on Adobe's PostScript fonts, but its quality turned out to be inferior. It was bought by Microsoft which has contributed to it not disappearing. The main strength of TrueType is that it offers font designers a large degree of control over how their fonts are displayed at different sizes.

The problem with most programs is that they don't normally use truetype. In general they load the sources in Postscript style and all insinuations are discarded; This is a big loss for sources with high quality. Aside from font design, there are two other keys to font quality to consider: character profile and insinuation. Only a few foundries currently produce fonts that fully exploit truetype's innuendo potential. There are now applications that convert a Type 1 of Postscript into a truetype, but the scripts are better than the automatically generated ones.

Plotters are used to make drawing impressions of architectural, engineering, industrial design plans, etc., for printing sheets, posters, photographic enlargements, billboards, signs on routes, public roads, signage, etc. There are two types of plotters depending on the use of their inks, water-based or solvent-based. A particular case is the cutting plotter, which cuts an adhesive medium that will then be fixed to another surface, from t-shirts to car bodies.

There are devices such as cell phones, which are used in photographic development houses or at home. These devices are usually known as photo printers, photo-quality printers, or photo printing bases. These devices print in color, producing images that mimic the range of colors and resolutions of photographic developing methods prior to this technology.

A menudo se utiliza el modelo comercial de las maquinillas y las cuchillas de afeitar en el negocio de las impresoras. Las compañías pueden vender una impresora por debajo de su coste, y obtener beneficios de los cartuchos de tinta, papel u otras partes que se reemplazan. Esto ha causado disputas legales respecto al derecho de otras compañías distintas al fabricante de la impresora de vender cartuchos de tinta compatibles o alternativos. Para proteger al modelo comercial de las maquinillas y las cuchillas de afeitar muchos fabricantes invierten considerables sumas en desarrollo de nuevas tecnologías y sus patentes.

Otros fabricantes, en reacción a los desafíos que trae este modelo comercial, apuntan a obtener mayores beneficios de las impresoras y menos de los cartuchos de tinta, promoviendo los menores precios de los cartuchos a través de campañas de publicidad. Esto genera dos propuestas bien diferentes: "impresora barata - tinta cara" o "impresora cara - tinta barata". Finalmente, la decisión del consumidor depende de su tasa de interés de referencia o su preferencia intertemporal.[3]​[4]​.

Renting as a model for companies

In the corporate sphere, printer leasing has emerged as an alternative to the traditional model. This system allows companies, SMEs and freelancers to outsource printer management through periodic payments, freeing up resources for strategic activities. The model typically includes:.

Contracts typically last 24 to 60 months, converting capital expenditures (CAPEX) into operating expenses (OPEX) with deductible tax advantages. Manufacturers such as Ricoh, Kyocera or Xerox offer these services, where the benefit no longer comes mainly from consumables, but from the comprehensive management of the printing park. This model also extends to photocopiers and professional production equipment.[5][6][7]​.

Tanto los cartuchos, como la tinta y el papel son 3 elementos imprescindibles para poder realizar copias con una impresora, y el saber escoger el elemento más adecuado en función del tipo de impresión que se pretende realizar puede aumentar el rendimiento de nuestra impresora hasta límites insospechados.

Cartridges

In the case of laser printers, the life of the cartridge depends on the amount of toner it contains and when the toner runs out, the cartridge must be replaced. If the cartridge and the OPC (sensitive photoconductive organ) are in separate compartments, when the toner runs out, only the cartridge is replaced, but if the OPC is inside the cartridge, both must be changed, considerably increasing the expense. The situation is more critical in the case of color laser printers.

In inkjet printers, the useful life of the cartridge depends on the life of the ink, although many cartridges can be refilled, which helps reduce the expense of buying a new one, although excessive use of a cartridge can cause lower quality prints.

Ink

There are two types of ink for printers:

The objective of every manufacturer of printer inks is that their inks can print on any medium and to this end they develop new types of ink with different chemical compositions almost daily.

Paper

Currently, when you want to make a high-quality copy on a printer, you have to use high-quality glossy paper. This paper is quite expensive and if you want to make many copies in photographic quality, the cost would be very high. Therefore, manufacturers are developing new printers that allow you to obtain high-quality prints on plain paper.

Some manufacturers, such as Epson, make their own paper.

Problems with paper

If you are not careful when selecting the right type of paper for the printer or when loading the paper, small problems can occur. Poor placement of the paper may result in the printer not detecting the paper, so simply reposition it correctly. This poor placement or poor choice of paper can also lead to a jam occurring during printing because the printer has taken several sheets at the same time, so you must be careful when placing the paper in the tray and you should not overload this tray with a lot of paper.

ink problems

Sometimes when printing documents or photographs, horizontal bands may appear that worsen the quality of the print. Although this problem can occasionally be related to a poor choice of printing paper it is usually due to ink problems in inkjet prints. One possible cause is the print quality settings, since the document may require a higher quality setting on the printer. Other possible causes could be that the cartridge is running out of ink or that the printheads are dirty.

Some other types of printers are important for historical reasons or for special uses, among them are the following:.