Did you know?

The Printer

The Printer

Did you know that the inventor of the world's first printer was Charles Babbage?

The year 1938 is considered the year of the appearance of the modern version of the printer. The discovery, considered revolutionary at the time, worked in a drying printing process. And although its capabilities have been questioned, the machine has endured and progressed over time, forming the basis of contemporary printers.

Commercial, consumer printers are designed for low volume printing that requires no setup time to start printing documents. However, printers are generally slow devices, keeping in mind that 30 pages per minute is considered fast, and cheaper consumer printers run much slower.

The best option for professional printing, on a large scale, still remained the printing press. However, in recent times, printers have increased their performance and quality in completing tasks, and most of the prints are made to order by local printers. They also took over the photo printing processes, digital photo printers becoming very common. Printers can be classified according to the type of technology they use, many techniques being available for sale. The choice of printing technology has a huge effect on the cost of the printer and the cost of operation, speed, quality and permanence of the documents.

Since 2005, the monopoly of laser and inkjet printer sales has been held by HP, today having 46% of inkjet printer sales and 55.5% of laser printer sales.

Multifunction printers appeared to make office work easier, having included, in addition to the traditional printer and copier, scanner and fax, all in one machine. These multifunction printers have become indispensable in any office in the world.

 Printers have certainly been one of the most useful inventions of the modern world and have had a spectacular evolution, from the mundane black and white, to color, then to 3D.

You certainly didn't know that:

  1. Manufacturing a cartridge requires 4 liters of oil. Manufacturing a cartridge has different stages. From the manufacture of the plastic case, to that of the electrical components, the ink to its transport to the place of distribution or sale, a cartridge "consumes" an average of four liters of oil.
  2.  The largest printer can print up to 185 m2. The largest printer in the world at the moment is called Infinitus (pretty suggestive) and measures 12 x 50m. It can print areas of up to 185 square meters and is used in large-scale advertising productions such as election campaigns or films.
  3.  We use too many cartridges. Cartridges come in different sizes and uses. Disposables are probably the ones that produce the most waste. But the cartridges can "die" if they are not properly cared for (they dry out) or they can suffer failures of the electrical part that require their premature replacement. So if we put all the used cartridges together, we could circle the earth three times.
  4. A color laser printer consume more resources than a PC.  Although it is small in size, during the printing process, a laser printer will consume more resources than the computer that commands it. Why? A laser printer has many components (toner, traction rollers, fuser units, etc.) that must work in perfect harmony to render the most accurate version of the image you want printed.
  5. The oven rolls exceed 200 degrees Celsius. Laser printers run on toner. The toner is stored in rollers, which heat up and transfer the toner to the cartridge, which then prints on the paper. The rollers in which the toner is located heat up to temperatures of over 200 degrees Celsius. But despite all this, the paper does not catch fire at the time of printing. It does not burn for the simple reason that it passes through the rollers of the oven quickly enough so as not to affect the integrity of the paper.