Color Printer

When it comes to making hard copy, you're going to need a printer. Often enough, black and white ink is serviceable - if you're a lawyer, for instance, or work for someone else who requires a lot of bulk text printing. If you need more than that, though - whether for aesthetic or other reasons - you're going to have to get a color printer.

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Color Printer Overview
There are a few different types of technology used in the manufacture of color printers. Different types of printing technology make for different pros and cons in a print. Some may print quickly but lack quality; others may have very high quality but go very slow. Some work better for specialized printing tasks, like making prints of photographs, for instance, or printing onto unique materials like t-shirt cloth, glossy paper, or transparencies.

A toner based printer, for example, uses static electricity to transfer toner from a printing drum onto the paper. These are also called color laser printers, due to the fact that precision lasers are used to facilitate adherence of the toner (ink) to the page. Laser printer technology is the technology used in copy machines or fax machines, and is extremely fast, especially when only working in black and white. They are common for many office applications. On the down side, color laser printers are also rather more expensive than the average color printer, and may be a bit of a stretch for the average home budget. Check out your options and decide what you want – if you intend to do a lot of color printing, and if time and speed is an issue, the cost may be well worth it.

Color Inkjet Printers
Color inkjet printers are the most common types of color printer used in color printing tasks. Inkjet printers work by spraying very small, very precise amounts of colored ink directly onto the page. Color printers using inkjet color printing technology may be manufactured for any level of quality. Some consumer-priced models are designed for simple applications, such as printing brochures or basic text. These are useful if all you need is the occasional greeting card or stack of flyers, but may be inadequate if you’re looking for something with a little more quality.

Photo Color Printers
Photo color printers, such as those manufactured by Canon or Epson, usually use bubble or inkjet color printing technology to produce very high quality images on standard stock or glossy photo paper. These printers are designed with the modern digital camera in mind, and allow the consumer to print his or own pictures at a personal computer rather than spending money on prints from a photo shop.

Because inkjet color printers – both photo and standard quality – are very cheap to produce, they are also generally fairly cheap to buy. A standard quality inkjet color printer will rarely run more than forty or fifty dollars, while a photo quality color printer will likely be little more than a hundred dollars. Some even include extra features such as fax machines and scanner platforms, allowing you to make copies – even color copies – in your own home.

Inkjet color printers are usually manufactured using the same style of marketing used to sell razors. What that means is, while the printer itself is fairly cheap, the ink is often more expensive – sometimes as much as thirty dollars for a single cartridge, unless you manage to get a good deal. What that means is, in the long run, a more expensive per-page cost than the laser color printing technology uses. Something to consider: if you plan to do a more or less normal amount of printing work, an inkjet color printer will most likely be all you need. If you need to do a lot of bulk printing, you may want to consider a laser color printer.

Other Types of Color Printer
Sometimes the color printing situation may not be the best for either laser or bubble jet color printing technology. If you have to print on specialized papers, or plastic transparencies, you may need to try something else. One possibility is the solid ink color printer, also known as the phase change printer. They use a special thermal transfer printing technology to transfer color from solid state CMYK colored ink sticks onto the printing medium. Sold ink printers are especially useful when printing onto difficult mediums like color transparencies. They usually cost about as much for both purchase and printing as laser color printers.

For professional photographers and other people requiring extremely high quality color printing technology, bubble jet printing technology and other kinds of color printers may not be sufficient to the task. In the early years of digital photography, digital print shops turned to advanced printing methods in order to produce good, high quality prints. One of those techniques is a printing technology called dye sublimation. A dye sublimation uses heat to transfer dye directly onto a medium like glossy photography paper or heavy canvas for long lasting prints. While not as well suited for simple applications like text, dye sublimation printers are perfect for making color prints. These types of printers used to be owned primarily by professional photo printers, but recent advances in manufacturing and printing technology have made them much more widely available.

Why Use A Color Printer?
Why would anyone want to use a color printer, as opposed to a simple black and white text printer? One obvious answer is another question: why not? These days, it’s actually fairly difficult to even find a black and white only printer, unless you’re shopping in thrift stores for technology that’s been outdated for a decade. Color printers are often very cheap – in many cases, you can buy a consumer priced model for only thirty or forty dollars from your local big box supply store.

One advantage of color printers, such as those manufactured by Canon or Epson, is simply aesthetics. For nearly every application beyond simple block text printing, a little bit of color can add a lot of interest to a document. A blue line or red header in a corporate letterhead add a sense of variety and professionalism to a memo or official document. Colored clip art or pictures can make a play handout seem professional compared to the black and white, poorly printed jobs printers were capable of five or ten years ago.

Beyond that, there are many other reasons still to buy a color printer. Take photography, for instance. In the old days, photography was quite expensive. First, you bought the camera. Even today, film cameras really aren’t that expensive – the money comes in later. After buying a camera, you would buy film. With film cameras, there were generally two types of people – the casual photographer, who would ration film religiously and only take the necessary pictures – and even then, would only end up with a few good pictures out of all those taken – and the professional or amateur photographer, who bought film like bread and milk and used roll after roll without looking back or considering the financial cost. The old joke is that there’s no more prolific photographer than the one who’s using someone else’s film – film rolls were not cheap, and when someone else was paying for it, it made it a lot easier to use.

These days, digital photography has changed things up significantly. Now anyone can take dozens or hundreds or even thousands of pictures without actually making prints of a single one if you don’t want to. Unlike film, you can choose to make prints of only those pictures you really like. And, if you have a color photo printer, you can make prints on demand. Download pictures from your camera onto your computer, delete the ones you don’t like, and print out the best of the crop. Thanks to digital cameras and color printing technology, the average cost of good photographs has been drastically reduced.

What Else To Look For In A Color Printer
Strangely enough, there are more things you can use a color printer for than simply color printing. These days, many color printers are equipped with extra features you can use for a wide range of other facts. Many are even designed with modern digital photography in mind, and make printing pictures easier than ever.

One feature many midrange color printers are equipped with these days is a high quality scanner. A scanner can be used for a number of purposes. Most scanners include text recognition technology – if you lay a page of printed text on the surface and hit ‘scan’, the technology will convert the image of the text to actual text. If you get a higher model which is efficient and fast, you can make transcribing documents into digital format easier than ever. Want to make a PDF of some old documents, or just convert some of your old typewritten work into an editable text document? Scanners can make that easier.

Other uses for scanner-equipped color printers
Printers equipped with scanners can also almost always be used as copiers. Whether you need to make a black and white copy or a color copy, color printers with scanners allow you simply to place a document on the scanning bed, press ‘black and white copy’ or ‘color copy’, and receive the copy that comes out. There are some advantages and disadvantages to this, as usual – bubble jet or ink jet printers are usually much slower than Xerox copiers or other high speed printing solutions. If you can get a laser color printer with a scanner bed, though, you’ll likely have a very high copy rate right in your own home, which can often be invaluable.

Technical Details and Upcoming Printing Technology
Five to ten years ago, most printers were equipped with a cumbersome cord with a wide head and a number of individual pins. This cord attached to the LPT ports in your computer and took up a lot of space. These days, most computers don’t even have LPT ports, which is a consideration when buying printers – if you’re looking for used printers, especially old models in thrift stores and garage sales, make sure that either the printer doesn’t use an LPT connection or that your computer actually has one. An LPT head is about two inches long by three quarters wide, and has a double row of pins surrounded by a metal ridge.

The current common cord which nearly all modern printers use is the standard USB cable. You’ve probably seen these – most digital cameras connect with a USB cord, as to many keyboards and other input devices manufactured in the last few years. About half an inch long and a fourth wide, USB cables are much smaller, more manageable, and faster at transferring technology. Many printers include direct USB inputs to allow you to plug your camera directly into the printer rather than having to go through the trouble of using the computer as a middle step.

Wireless Color Printer Technology
One modern technology which looks promising in the field of printer connections is called Bluetooth technology. Bluetooth is used with many cutting edge cameras, cell phones, and music players already. It uses advanced wireless technology to eliminate the need for cords altogether, and works on the basis of total compatibility with all devices. Bluetooth is taking off, and will very likely be common worldwide in a year or two. The idea of Bluetooth is that you would set a printer beside your laptop or desktop and your computer would automatically detect and connect to the printer. That’s the beauty of Bluetooth: if you then sat a digital camera equipped with Bluetooth technology down beside that printer and computer, you could choose to either print pictures directly or download them to your computer, or both.


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