Printers have been around for a very long time. From the old hand cranked block printing machines, to the most advanced color laser printers on the market, they have made tedious writing by hand outdated. Now you simply have to type up what you want to say on your computer, put paper into sheet feeder, and push print. Like magic out comes your document making it easy to print a book, send out some flyers for your church bake sale, or whatever your printing needs are.

Before the advent of computer printers for home use, to get these types of documents one would have to go and pay a printing business to make them for you, or make one by hand and photocopy it. Either way could be quite costly if you wanted to make lots of copies.

Printers come in a wide variety; there is dot matrix, ink-jet, bubble-jet, and laser printers to name a few. Dot matrix printers are sort of antiques now but they used a series of pins to make the lettering. If you look closely at a document or photo printed on one of these you can make out the dot patterns. Ink and bubble-jet printers work by squirting heated ink through a matrix of holes to form images or characters.

Laser printers form the characters or image on a special-coated drum with a laser light, which is turned off and on as dictated by the computer, then transfers the output from the drum to the paper, using photocopying techniques. Less commonly used printers for home use are Thermal-wax-transfer printers and dye-sublimation printers that use heat to transfer color pigment from a ribbon to a special paper to produce photographic-quality color images.

To further differentiate the various printers, you can break them down to impact and non-impact. One other example is the formed character printer. The way that these work is by forcing a metal or plastic character against an inked ribbon to produce a sharp image on paper. These characters may be on a moving bar, a rotating ball, a rapidly rotating chain, or wheel spokes. Although noisy, impact printers can produce multiple copies of business forms simultaneously using carbon or carbonless techniques.

Non-impact printers use thermal and electrostatic, rather than mechanical, techniques, such as ink-jet, laser, bubble-jet, and the others mentioned above. Non-impact printers are quieter than impact printers and produce higher quality output, especially of graphics, but at a greater cost per page of course. Whatever one you choose, printers are an integral part of everyone's life!