Chapter 32: How Black-and-White Printing Works
How Printers Make Cookie Cutter Text
Bitmap or outline (postscript/truetype)
How the First Printers Created Text
How a Laser Printer Works
Write-black (Canon, HP) produce finer details versus write-white (Ricoh) which yield darker black areas.
How Color Printing Works
Thermal printer (vivid but slow); color laser printer (precise detail but expensive); dye sublimation/dye diffusion thermal transfer (D2T2); solid ink (virtually indistinguishable from color photos even at 300 dpi.
How Printed Colors are Created
Additive color (light); Subtractive color (pigment); color pixel print offset = dithering; ink drops are 1/10e6 of a drop of water
How a Color Ink Jet Printer Works
How a Photo Printer Works
Dye inks are slow to dry and fade in light but have a wide gamut. Pigments are dye based but better resist light and environmental degradation. Photo quality printers use more inks (CMYK + light red + light blue + gray or green).
Piezo electric nozzles (piezo is a crystalline substance that bends with electrical stimulation) give greater control over the size of the drops than an ink jet (small as 2 picoliters). Paper that best suits the ink is ceramic coated porous papers (absorbs ink quickly but ceramic coating leaves ink exposed); plastic coated swellable papers protectively encapsulate dye and pigment when ink seeps into fibers.
Dye sublimation printer print heads heat colored film (one each for CMYK) and sublimate color from film to paper for each color in the final product.
How a Color Laser Printer Works
Electrostatic charge, tandem color laser printer
How a Solid Ink Color Printer Works
Solid ink is melted into a reservoir in the print heads, each nozzle is piezo controlled to push ink drops onto an offset drum.
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