Desktop printers are printers that are designed to be small enough to fit on a desk or table at home or in an office. There are different types of desktop printers including laser printer, dot matrix printers and inkjet printers.

Laser Printers

Laser printers, unlike other desktop printers do not use ink, they use a toner cartridge. Laser printers work by reading electronic data from the image or document sent from your computer. This data is then beamed onto a photosensitive drum inside the printer which builds up a pattern of static electricity that represents the document. A dry powder called toner is then attracted by this static onto the paper which is fused using heated rollers producing a high-quality printed document.

Dot Matrix Printers

A dot matrix printer uses an impact process to print. The data for the image is sent from your computer to the printer. This image is then reproduced by the printer using a series of dots created by a series of small pins that are driven through an ink ribbon. There are 2 types of dot matrix printers, 9 and 24-pin. The number of pins determines the final print quality with a 24-pin printer producing much sharper graphics and text. The speed of printing is measured in characters per second rather than pages per minute. Dot matrix printers are ideal when the content is more important than the quality of the print output.

Inkjet Printers

Inkjet printers recreate images by propelling droplets of ink from ink cartridges onto paper or other substrate. The image from your computer is sent to the printer and stored in the printer's buffer memory. The paper is drawn through the printer and a printhead with moves backwards and forwards across it. The printhead contains nozzles and as it travels across the paper it draws the correct colour from the ink cartridges and expels the ink onto the paper. The ink then dries and produces finished printed document. Most inkjet printers are plug and play, meaning they are easy to set up and ready for immediate use. The replacement of ink is simple with many printers featuring snap-in place cartridges. Some inkjet printers come with WiFi connectivity as standard, allowing you to connect to your smart devices and feature touch screens allowing further interconnectivity and control.