Printers and Scanners

The printer takes the information on your screen and transfers it to paper or a hard copy. There are many different types of printers with various levels of quality. The three basic types of printer are; dot matrix, inkjet, and laser.

• Dot matrix printers work like a typewriter transferring ink from a ribbon to paper with a series or 'matrix' of tiny pins.

• Ink jet printers work like dot matrix printers but fires a stream of ink from a cartridge directly onto the paper.

• Laser printers use the same technology as a photocopier using heat to transfer toner onto paper.

Scanners allow you to transfer pictures and photographs to your computer. A scanner 'scans' the image from the top to the bottom, one line at a time and transfers it to the computer as a series of bits or a bitmap. You can then take that image and use it in a paint program, send it out as a fax or print it. With optional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software you can convert printed documents such as newspaper articles to text that can be used in your word processor. Most scanners use TWAIN software that makes the scanner accessable by other software applications.