Printing stories - Page 18

Putting ink on paper goes back thousands of years and is still as necessary today as it was in 2500BC. Printers today are often inexpensive, always ubiquitous, and occasionally astonishingly capable. From the small desktop devices producing several pages per minute through to large format production printers, the technologies underpinning these devices are often the same, although the scale, specifications and prices can differ wildly. Printers are usually of the inkjet or laser type, with industrial printers using offset lithography for large print runs. Don’t write off the dot matrix, either. These still serve a purpose, as the unique striking action makes them ideal for where multiple copies are required (including the manufacturing and logistics industries).