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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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and scanner of some sort—with the all-in-ones you’re probably familiar with.

As you go upmarket, the greatest improvements tend to be in speed/capacity,

durability, and document handling/finishing features such as sorting, stapling,

binding, and so on.

Because MFDs are so varied, we’ll look at some of the individual

components and technologies you may find inside them separately—be

prepared to encounter these components as both standalone devices and

included with other components in an MFD. I’ve added 3-D printers to this

section; you won’t find these as anything but standalone devices, not MFDs.

Printers

No other piece of your computer system is available in a wider range of

styles, configurations, and feature sets than a printer, or at such a wide price

variation. What a printer can and can’t do is largely determined by the type of

printer technology it uses—that is, how it gets the image onto the paper.

Modern printers can be categorized into several types: impact, inkjet, dyesublimation,

thermal, laser, 3-D, and virtual.

Impact Printers

Printers that create an image on paper by physically striking an ink ribbon

against the paper’s surface are known as impact printers. Although daisywheel

printers (essentially an electric typewriter attached to the computer

instead of directly to a keyboard) have largely disappeared, their cousins, dotmatrix

printers, still soldier on in many offices. Although dot-matrix printers

don’t deliver what most home users want—high quality and flexibility at a

low cost—they’re still widely found in businesses for two reasons: dot-matrix

printers have a large installed base in businesses, and they can be used for

multipart forms because they actually strike the paper. Impact printers tend to

be relatively slow and noisy, but when speed, flexibility, and print quality are

not critical, they provide acceptable results. Computers that print multipart

forms, such as point of sale (POS) machines, use special impact paper that

can print receipts in duplicate, triplicate, or more. These POS machines

represent the major market for new impact printers, although many older dotmatrix

printers remain in use.

Dot-matrix printers use a grid, or matrix, of tiny pins, also known as

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