Evolution Of Printers

The printing press is considered to be the most revolutionary invention in the history of the printing industry. It was invented in Germany by a goldsmith named Johann Gutenberg.At the time, this revolutionary invention greatly increased the speed at which books were printed. By today’s standards, the process was still incredibly slow, though. These wooden machines had to be manually operated, and even the ink had to applied to the text-blocks manually.

The printing revolution began when Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable type press and is regarded as the most important event of the modern period. The standard process involved a hard metal punch with letters engraved back to front that was hammered into a softer copper bar, creating a matrix. It is placed into a mold and filled with molten-type metal. The resulting peice of type is then removed from the mold.

The first automatic printing press was constructed, and this printing press greatly increased the efficiency at which newspapers and books were printed. This primitive press was powered by steam.

Rotary drum printing was invented by Richard March Hoe. It is a printing press in which the impressions are curved around a cylinder so that the printing can be done on long continuous rolls of paper, cardboard, plastic, or a large number of other substrates.

Chester Carlson invented a dry printing process called electrophotography commonly called a Xerox. It was a way of transmitting and printing facsimilies of printed images using a beam of directed ions directed onto a rotating drum of insulating material. The ions would create an electrostatic charge on the drum. A fine powder could then be dusted upon the drum; the powder would stick to the parts of the drum that had been charged, This was the foundation technology for modern laser printing.

The first high speed printer was invented by Remington-Rand for the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC). The printer was based on the electrophotography dry printing process called Xerox.

The daisy wheel printer was invented by David S. Lee at Diablo Data Systems.The system is an interchangeable metal or plastic "daisy wheel" holding an entire character set as raised characters moulded on each "petal". A motor rotates the wheel to position the required character between the hammer and the ribbon. A hammer drives the character type on to the ribbon and paper to print the character on the paper.

The LA30 was a 30 character/second dot matrix printer introduced in 1970 by Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts. It printed 80 columns of uppercase-only 5x7 dot matrix characters across a unique-sized paper. Dot matrix impact printers were generally considered the best combination of expense and versatility, and until the 1990s they were by far the most common form of printer used with personal computers.

The original laser printer, named EARS, was developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center beginning in 1969 and completed in November, 1971. Xerox Engineer, Gary Starkweather adapted Xerox copier technology adding a laser beam to it to come up with the laser printer.

According to IBM, the very first IBM 3800 was installed in the central accounting office at F. W. Woolworth’s North American data center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1976." The IBM 3800 Printing System was the industry’s first high-speed, laser printer. A laser printer that operated at speeds of more than 100 impressions-per-minute. It was the first printer to combine laser technology and electrophotography.

The Xerox 9700 Electronic Printing System was the first xerographic laser printer product. The 9700, a direct descendent from the original PARC "EARS" printer which pioneered in laser scanning optics, character generation electronics, and page-formatting software, was the first product on the market to be enabled by PARC research.

The HP LaserJet was the first desktop laser printer priced at about $3,500. Dot-matrix and daisy-wheel units were both noisy. Dot-matrix had poor resolution, and daisy-wheels allowed only a limited number of fonts to be used. HP realized the field was wide open for product innovations. HP worked with Canon on laser printer technology as far back as the 1970s which led to the introduction of the first LaserJet.

The HP DeskJet was the first mass-market inkjet printer. The DeskJet offered continuous plain-paper printing and higher print quality than its inkjet predecessors and was priced at about $1,000.

HP offers a Deskjet with a colour printing upgrade, creating a revolution in colour printing.

Solid ink is a technology was originally created by Tektronix in 1986 and bought over by Xerox in 2000. Solid ink technology utilizes solid ink sticks in lieu of the fluid ink or toner powder usually used in printers. After the ink stick is loaded into the printing device, it is melted and used to produce images on paper. Xerox claims that solid ink printing produces more vibrant colors than other methods, is easier to use, can print on a wide range of media & is more environmentally friendly.