Some Electronic Printer Metrics

摘要

Non-impact electronic printers have now been with us for some 25 years. The whole nonimpact market began with the IBM 3800 and Xerox 9700 electronic printers offered in the mid-1970s. The IBM 3800 was intended to be a replacement for the impact line printer, which resided in computer data centers. The Xerox 9700 was a cut sheet printer which was intended as an electronic document printer although it also replaced traditional line printers in many applications. These two fast and large electronic printers started the snowball downhill on the development of electronic printing at a fast a furious pace in the last 25 years. The web fed printers used as line printer replacements soon gave way to the much more popular and practical cut sheet printers originated by Xerox. Also, the Xerox 9700 printer operating at 300 X 300 pixels per inch, had considerably more flexibility than the IBM 3800 which began life as a 180 X 144 pixel per inch printer. The 9700 placed almost 3.5 times as many pixels per unit area as the 3800 and enabled the business and office electronic document market to begin. Now, with a plethora of new inkjets, thermal, laser electrophotographic, etc. printers, how is the user able to tell if we are just getting more devices or better ones? Clearly, image quality has improved enormously and using color in your daily work is no longer a risk to one's career. To help analyze this situation, this paper will attempt to derive and show printer technology in three easy to remember and easy to analyze approaches that should tell the user if the "new" printer is really an improvement or just an also ran. Accessories like multiple print trays, finishing options, etc. are not considered here. We will look at the electronic printer as an information provider, which after all is its real purpose.