Business desktop and workgroup printers use a range of technologies, each having trade-offs in terms of price, speed, and quality. A business that publishes its own financial reports, manuals, and other multipage publications need a quicker printer than one that simply prints invoices occasionally. Dot-matrix and inkjet printers are much slower than laser printers, which have faster speeds but inferior quality. Laser printers are the fastest.
Laser and LED
Copier technology is used in laser and light-emitting diode (LED) printers, which print an entire page at once. Static electricity patterns are created within the printer as a laser beam or LED array scans the surface of a light-sensitive metal disc. When mechanisms force paper against the drum, the toner bonds to the sheet to create a printed page. Toner powder adheres to places of static charge. Desktop laser printers may print between 4 and more than 50 pages per minute, while commercial ones can print up to 1000 ppm.
Thermal
Specialty equipment known as thermal printers is used in calculators, bar-code systems, cash registers, and label makers. An array of heating elements in a thermal printer are managed by an electrical system, creating minute hot spots on paper that has undergone particular treatment. The paper becomes black when it reaches a particular temperature. Since no ink is required, printing is robust, affordable, and simple to maintain. A few of the quickest examples can print at a speed of 300 mm per second, or 60 pages per minute. For general-purpose word processing or report documents, these printers are not utilized.
Inkjet
High-quality papers from an inkjet printer are produced in relatively small quantities. It prints by sprinkling microscopic ink droplets from a cartridge onto a page while moving the cartridge back and forth across the paper to progressively generate the document, one line at a time. Generally speaking, inkjet printer speeds range from 1 to 20 ppm; the higher the print quality, the lower the ppm.
Dot Matrix
Dot-matrix printers continue to be used despite being mostly displaced by more modern inkjet and laser technologies because of their dependability, low operating costs, and capacity to print multipart forms. An impact design, a dot-matrix printer creates characters on the paper by hitting an inked ribbon with fine wire pins. Their pace varies from 200 to 1120 characters per second, or around 12 to 60 pages per minute in draught mode, depending on the model. In a high-quality mode, which operates at half to a third of the maximum speed, the print mechanism fills the forms of each letter with two or three passes per line of text.
