Research

The history of printing started around 3000 BC with the duplication of images. The use of round "cylinder seals" for rolling an impress onto clay tablets goes back to early Mesopotamian civilization before 3000 BC, where they are the most common works of art to survive, and feature complex and beautiful images. In both China and Egypt, the use of small stamps for seals preceded the use of larger blocks. In Egypt, Europe and India, the printing of cloth certainly preceded the printing of paper or papyrus; this was probably also the case in China. The process is essentially the same - in Europe special presentation impressions of prints were often printed on silk until at least the seventeenth century.

Label printer applicators are basic robots that automatically print and apply pressure sensitive labels to various products. Some types of labeling include shipping labeling, content labeling, graphic images, and labeling to comply with specific standards such as those of GS1 and Universal Product Code U.P.C. A pressure sensitive label consists of a label substrate and adhesive. First developed in the late 1970s, today there are over 70 manufacturers of these types of machines worldwide.

A line matrix printer is a computer printer that is a compromise between a lineprinter and a dot matrix printer. Basically, it prints a page-wide line of dots. It builds up a line of text by printing lines of dots.

A barcode printer (or bar code printer) is a computer peripheral for printing barcode labels or tags that can be attached to physical objects. Barcode printers are commonly used to label cartons before shipment, or to label retail items with UPCs or EANs.

A thermal printer (or direct thermal printer) produces a printed image by selectively heating coated thermochromic paper, or thermal paper as it is commonly known, when the paper passes over the thermal print head. The coating turns black in the areas where it is heated, producing an image. Two-color direct thermal printers can print both black and an additional color (often red) by applying heat at two different temperatures.

The line printer is a form of high speed impact printer in which one line of type is printed at a time. They are mostly associated with the early days of computing, but the technology is still in use. Print speeds of 600 to 1200 lines-per-minute (approximately 10 to 20 pages per minute) were common.

The IBM Selectric typewriter was a highly successful model line of electric typewriters introduced by IBM on July 31, 1961.

A laser printer is a common type of computer printer that rapidly produces high quality text and graphics on plain paper. As with digital photocopiers and multifunction printers (MFPs), laser printers employ a xerographic printing process, but differ from analog photocopiers in that the image is produced by the direct scanning of a laser beam across the printer's photoreceptor.

An inkjet printer is a type of computer printer that creates a digital image by propelling droplets of ink onto paper. Inkjet printers are the most commonly used type of printer and range from small inexpensive consumer models to very large professional machines that can cost up to thousands of dollars.

Daisy wheel printers use an impact printing technology invented in 1969 by David S. Lee at Diablo Data Systems. It uses interchangeable pre-formed type elements, each with typically 96 glyphs, to generate high-quality output comparable to premium typewriters such as the IBM Selectric, but two to three times faster. Daisy-wheel printing was used in electronic typewriters, word processors and computer systems from 1972. According to Webster's, the daisy wheel is so named because of its resemblance to the flower.