Certain issues immediately reduce the printer models available. For example, if you have only 5500 available or if portability is an issue, laser printers is not an option.
The first question is how much money you have to spend. Around S175 purchases a good 9-pin dot-matrix printer that can print in draft mode or in near-letter quality. At the other extreme, you can use a 55000 PostScript printer for some publishing purposes. In between, many printer models exist to choose from.
Most people use their printers to print one copy of a document. Others want a printer that can be carried on the road, or that can print stencils, mimeo-graphs, multipart forms, and transparencies.
Portability. Nowadays, many people want a portable printer to go along with their laptop computer. Portable printers must be light, and they run on batteries, so they are more expensive than their desktop counterparts. Older portable printers used a thermal technology. The print head contained dots that heated up. The special paper had to change color in response to the heat, and the output looked terrible. In some cases, a copy machine could not copy it. Today, most portable printers are using inkjet technology. Canon and Diconixs are the most popular vendors.
Stencils and mimeographs. Some organizations need a printer that can create stencils or mimeographs. A stencil is a paper-like material with holes cut in it. The ink bleeds through the holes. Mimeograph is a paper-like material with special waxy substance attached in a mirror image of what is to appear. The waxy substance picks up ink and then transfers the ink to paper. Stencils look and last better than mimeo-graphs. You can create stencils from typed or printed pieces of paper, but this process is expensive. You can create mimeographs from any document relatively inexpensively. But, if the mimeographs are created by a printer directly, the duplicates look much better. Printing stencils and mimeographs requires an impact printer. The holes a 24-pin dot-matrix printer creates in a stencil are good at limiting the ink flow, thus producing much cleaner looking duplicates. Usually, a wide-carriage printer is needed because landscape printing often is required.
Multipart forms. If you print multipart forms, you need an impact printer. Most dot-matrix printers are specified to print up to five sheets of carbonless forms or three sheets of paper and two carbons. Printing more copies requires a special printer.
Transparencies in more than one color only can be created with plotters. Single-color transparencies for laser printers are available, but they require an expensive special transparency material (a ream costs about 5250). Plotter transparencies cost only about $125 per ream, but the output of a plotter is not as nice as a laser printer's.
See the web section "Determining Your Required Output" for more information on certain printer capabilities and the inkjet cartridges or toner cartridges they use.
Using paper 8 1/2 inches wide or less is easy. Paper wider than 8 1/2 inches requires wide-carriage dot matrix and inkjet printers. Laser printers are normally incapable of printing on anything larger than 8 1/2-by-1l-inch paper
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