What is Impact Printer | Types of Impact Printer

Computer cannot be presumed as an applicable device if output devices are missing as we all know about the functions of output devices of computer. It is the source of displaying the consequences of the processing on respective data and information provided by the user i.e. we can say that the output is displayed or is provided to the users through output devices. Printer is one of the most talk about, well known and commonly used output devices that provides the processed data and information in hard copy form i.e. the results provided by this device are tangible and in printed form.

Different important and useful features of  printer have been discussed earlier. Read:  What features should you look for in a Printer?. High resolution color printers are used for designing a good brochure, creating book covers, printing designs on clothes, product package printing and much more. Though costly, but this useful output device is immensely demanding in every field today.

What is Impact Printer

Earlier, when printers were invented, they were quite drowsy and low in quality. Today's printers are very fast and efficient and can print high quality images, text and graphics. Different types of printers have different working principle. The working principle of Impact printers resembles the one a typewriter works on i.e. the characters and images are printed by striking the hammer against an inked ribbon. As a result, the inked ribbon is pressed on the paper to print the text or image.

Impact printing is cheap and low quality printing. These printers are quite slow in speed and make noise while printing. These printers are not very desirable at the places where speedy and high resolution outputs are required.

Types of impact printer

Some important types of impact printer are given below:

• Dot Matrix Printer

A Dot Matrix printer consists of tiny pins on the print head. This print head strikes an inked ribbon which is pressed against the paper to print the characters and images. The quality of the graphics and text printed by a Dot Matrix printer depends upon the number of pins the print head consists of. The larger the number of pins on the print head, the more dots is produced on the paper and hence a high quality image is printed. Usually the print head of a dot matrix printer contains 9 to 24 pins.

As far as we talk about the speed of the Dot Matrix printers, it is slow as the speed is measured in characters per second (cps). The speed of most dot matrix printers ranges between 350 and 1100 characters per second. Impact printers are the oldest printing technologies and thus they print low quality images and are quite noisy. One advantage that can be obtained from such printers is cheap and low priced printouts.

• Line Printer

Line printer is another type of Impact Printers that prints the entire line at a time. As it has been explained earlier that the dot matrix printers are slow in speed and their printing speed depends upon the number of characters they can print in one second. However line printers are quite fast and efficient in comparison with the dot matrix printers as the line printers have the ability to print the entire line at a time. Line Printers are considered as the fastest type of impact printers. The speed of a Line printer is measured in lines per minute (lpm). Many line printers are fast enough to print 3000 lines per minute.

• Daisy Wheel Printer

One of the types of impact printer, Daisy Wheel Printer, prints the characters and text using a print wheel which is known as daisy wheel. The daisy wheel contains characters on its petals. The characters are printed on the paper when the hammer strikes the petal against the inked ribbon. The motor rotates the wheel so that the desired character containing petal is printed on the paper. The characters are printed one by one as each character on a petal of the wheel is stroked through hammer. The process of printing in the daisy wheel printers is quite slow. However daisy wheel printer can print high quality text as compared to dot matrix printer.