If inkjets leave you flustered and lasers sound dangerous, check out our guide to the various types of printing solutions available.

Like computers, printers can be found everywhere around us, whether at home, in the office, at a supermarket cashier or even at photo sticker machines. In fact, if you're reading this article from your computer screen, chances are there is a printer nearby. This is because over the last couple of years, technological advances made in the various fields of printing have not only increased print resolution, they have also brought the prices of printers down, making them more affordable than ever.

There are many different types of printers currently available in the market, and each serves a different purpose. Inkjets, being the most affordable among the lot, are commonly used in homes, while laser and solid ink printers with their higher capacities and faster speeds are employed in heavy-duty office environments. The rapid growth in digital photography has also spurred the use of six-color inkjets and dye-sublimation printers for photo-quality prints.

So before you decide on your next printer purchase, arm yourself with some background information on the various printing technologies to avoid any purchase frustrations.

Not all inks are created equal
Learn about the different types of inks used in desktop printers, from the ubiquitous inkjet to the more proprietary solid ink.

A buyer's checklist
Your choice of ink type could be significant to your print job. Our checklist could help simplify your buying decision.

Not all inks are created equal

Inkjet
Inkjet technology comes in two flavors: thermal and piezo-electric. The former, which is employed by most of the printer manufacturers like Canon and HP, uses tiny heating elements to shoot microscopic droplets of ink through the ultra-fine print head nozzles. This is done in continuous passes across the page while the paper is advanced vertically in a co-ordinated operation. Printers that use Epson's proprietary piezo-electric technology apply an electric current to change the shape of the piezo element which houses a nozzle. As a result, ink is being forced out of the nozzle onto the paper when the crystalline element shrinks slightly.

The difference between the two technologies is hardly noticeable since printers these days are not only affordable, print resolutions have matured to an extent where even the lowest end models can produce pretty decent prints. Users should note that while prices of inkjet printers are traditionally lower than lasers, the cost per page is much higher due to the expensive inks and specially-coated media. Inkjet prints also tend to smudge quite easily when they come in contact with water.

Laser
The printing process that goes on inside a laser printer is a little more complicated than an inkjet printer. After the image is first stored in the printer memory, it is converted into proper instructions for the printer's built-in processor to form an image. The image then goes through a series of processes where it is scanned onto a drum by a laser beam or LED (Light Emitting Diodes), treated with toner powder, transferred onto a statically charged paper media and eventually fused in to complete the whole procedure.

Traditionally, laser printers are known for their low operating costs, high quality prints and large handling capacities. For these reasons, they are often used in busy office environments. However, with laser printers becoming more affordable, they can now be found in homes and small offices. Lowered costs in color laser printers have also encouraged many companies to switch to color printing.

Solid ink
Besides laser printers, solid ink printers probably provide the best alternative to office color printing. A proprietary technology used mainly by Fuji Xerox in its Phaser printers, solid ink printing involves melting the wax ink sticks into the print head which shoots the ink onto the drum to form the full image. This image is then transferred to the paper in a single pass and cold-fused to produce the final print.

Solid ink printers are generally considered cheaper in terms of cost and maintenance compared to a similarly configured laser model as the former is made up of lesser components. Initially, Fuji Xerox provided free black ink sticks to customers to encourage color printing. This practice has since been discontinued in its latest 8200 model.

While some people feel that the print quality from solid ink printers is not as good as the ones from high-end color lasers, most agree it makes an excellent office workgroup printer with its high print speeds and compatibility to various print media. Best of all, replacing the ink in the printer simply involves dropping the shape-coded ink sticks into matching slots.

Dye Sublimation
Dye-sublimation printers use heated layers of a color film (CMYK) roll to produce photo-quality prints. A heating element first heats the color film to vapor and then diffuses it onto the surface of the specially treated paper. This is done for each of the four colors to form the complete image. Color intensity is controlled by the varying the temperature of the heating element.

Photos produced from dye sublimation are known for their high image quality as well as accurate continuous tones. But at about AU$10.50 per A4 print, dye-sub printing is not cheap and therefore pretty much exclusive to graphics artists and professional photographers.

Thermal wax
Thermal wax printers work pretty much the same way dye-sub printers do, except that instead colored dyes, it uses colored wax on film sheets. Because of its wax-based nature and good color reproduction, thermal wax printers are often used for printing transparencies and presentation graphics.

Thermal autochrome
While dye-subs obtain their color from film sheets, thermal autochrome printers put the ink in multiple-layered color pigments on the paper instead. On every pass, selective portions of each pigment layer are activated by heating elements in the print head, followed by fixing with ultraviolet light. As each color is heat-sensitive at a different temperature, the heating element provides the suitable temperature to activate each color separately on the different passes.

Dot matrix
Before inkjets were available, dot matrix printers--together with laser printers--were used extensively in homes and offices. Also known as impact printers, dot matrix printers employ pins to strike against ink ribbons that produce dots to make up the full characters. The more pins there are (up to 24), the better the print quality. Print speeds range from 50 to 500 characters per second (cps).

To this day, dot matrix printers are still used in many industries primarily because of their low cost-per-page and ability to print continuously over multiple pages. Some of its applications include printing forms, receipts and sticker labels.

A buyer's checklist