A lot of large manufacturing companies are involved in the printer industry. A short list of some of the biggest includes Brother, Bull, Canon, Epson, Fujitsu, Genicom, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Kyocera, Lexmark, Olivetti, Oki, Panasonic, Printronix, QMS -Minolta, Ricoh, Tally, Tectronix, and Xerox.
Printer manufacturers have different strengths and market niches. Many of the businesses concerned have long histories - but some of today's star performers are relatively new to the computer printer business.
One view of printing is that it is osolescent, but regrettably still common in the Internet age. Perhaps a combination of fast processors, internet access to data and big flat screen displays will make printers obsolete?
In fact paper use seems to be growing. Innovations such as laser and ink jet printing have been some of the most significant in computing, making the idea of a computer on every desk more practical. Today's leading printer brand-names were early developers of these new technologies.
Computer printing seems to be a growth industry, and one where innovation can make a mark. Computer printers are also excellent examples of the way mechanical systems can be integrated with computer control. At the heart of most printers are sets of motors, clutches and gear-trains that are just like those needed for robot devices. Printer design and manufacture ought to cross-fertilise with automatic production systems, robotics and vehicle control systems.
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Basis of Printing
Mechanical printing has a long history, the basic process was invented in ancient China. Movable type was introduced in Europe by Guttenberg and Caxton in the 15th Century. The word "printer" today has two broad meanings -
The worker of a printing press. Computer printing has'nt reduced need for the commercial hundred -thousand page print job although it does take the market for 100 sheet jobs. Printing presses range from hand letter-presses - still used for craft-produced manuscripts and artwork - up to newspaper production machines with output rates that can be measured in millions of pages per day. Long runs of identical newsprint can cost under 0.1p per tabloid page.
A computer printing machine.
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Computer printers and bulk presses have until recently been very different sectors with different aims:
- bulk printers apply ink to media (paper card or cloth) at high speed and low cost in order to produce books, periodicals and packaging. The basic mechanism is that a plate of some kind is made up with a mirror-image of the page. Where the plate contacts the paper the ink transfers.
- computer printers provide "hard-copy" of records that vary, or are addressed in small quantity to a selected audience. There are five standard mechanisms:
- impact printing is roughly equivalent to the bulk-print process
- laser printing is a form of photocopying
- inkjet printing directly squirts droplets of ink onto the page
- direct thermal printing uses paper impregnated with chemicals that permanently change colour when heated
- thermal transfer printing uses films of wax that transfer to the paper when heated.
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One of the earliest automatic machines was the Jaquard loom. Jaquard looms used punch-card control - so they are one of the progenitors of computer machinery. A loom is not a printer - but an impressive demonstration of the machine was that Jaquard had his portrait woven by a machine.
In the 1830's Babbage's mechanical computer was designed with a printing mechanism. The Morse telegraph was originally intended to print it's dot-dash messages. It turned out that Morse code could be read by listening to the clicking noise - so the print mechanism was not necessary.
The earliest printing device with any relationship to today's computer printer is probably the "Scholes typewriter". A typewriter has a simple correspondence between the character the user wants to print, the key press to do this and the metal molding on the typeface that will hit the ribbon and press ink into paper. Typewriters reigned supreme as the way to produce low volume printing for a century from the 1880's until the early 1980's.
The earliest electrically controlled printers were teleprinters - printing telegraphs. Teleprinter design was often very different to that of a typewriter. Teleprinters have a motor to power the type action, and they don't have an inherent correspondence between codes on the wire and typeface hitting paper. The mechanism in a teleprinter is rather distinctive. A typical teleprinter had a cylindrical type head.
Teleprinters were widely used as computer printers. Some of the technology used in recent printers first came into widespread use in teleprinters - for instance the Teletype KSR43 was one of the earliest dot-matrix printers. It might be obvious that teletype makers would transform themselves into major printer manufacturers, but they don't seem to have achieved this.
Several of today's printer manufacturers evolved from typewriter makers - Brother and Olivetti for instance. Not all typewriter makers survived to make printers - Smith Corona missed the technological trend. IBM has a long history, making tabulators and other office machinery until they branched into computers in the 1950's. Although IBM were famous for computers the Selectric golf-ball typewriter was one of their most profitable lines for many years.
Some printer makers originated as photocopier makers. Photocopiers and printers are often separate machines, but the processes are similar and machines that can do both are likely to become more common. Xerox invented the electrostatic process that both machines are based on. Canon and Minolta both had backgrounds in camera making, took the logical step into photocopiers, and are now big names in computer printing.
// recent times this has begun to change - photocopied or laser-printed pages can nearly match the appearance of professional printing. In principle shuttle or large inkjet printers might be able to compete with newsprint on price.
Today's Printer Makers
The big success story in computer printing has been Hewlett Packard. Today they are the biggest name in printers - on some measures they have more than half the market. Hewlett Packard's success is based on innovations in the mid-80's and early 90's:
- Laser printers are based on photocopying technology. Hewlett Packard's printers are based on a Canon print engine - with HP electronics providing the PCL control language.
- Inkjet printers are an entirely new technology dating from the 1970's. A lot of manufacturers experimented with inkjets, but perhaps dot-matrix manufacturers saw them competing with their established product. Hewlett Packard's "PaintJet" series established a market lead which they have managed to retain for a decade.
HP were not the only people to realise that newer printers needed a graphics language. Adobe Postscript is widely regarded as the definitive page description language. PostScript has been licensed for use in all sorts of printers. The only problem with PostScript was the license fee, which limited it to expensive machines intended for use in typesetting and graphical design.
HP's PCL was built into their printers and unlike PostScript didn't have a big impact on price, so it was more widely accpted. Luck also helped. First generation laser printers accompanied PCs running DOS and text-oriented programs like word processors, so graphics weren't terribly important. Windows graphical operating systems became a mass-market product and so even word-processors aquired a graphical capability. Easy to use graphical capabilities at an affordable price became a rising priority.
The first really popular laser printer was the HPII. The HPII and Canon LBP8 used identical printer mechanisms, but the HP version had the PCL language and worked well with Microsoft Windows even when asked to print graphs and pictures. The Canon LBP8 was rather more inclined to refuse a picture and report an error, or to do something odd that spoilt the pager layout.