Hi Tech & Innovation

AI-driven tool makes it easy to personalize 3D-printable models

As 3D printers have become cheaper and more widely accessible, novice makers within a rapidly growing community are fabricating their own objects. To do this, many of these amateur artisans access free, open-source repositories ...

Engineering

An inkjet printer to produce optical filters and mirrors

Telescopes, light barriers, cameras, laser measurement technology, or smartphones: In many devices and systems, optical filters ensure that light is reflected or transmitted depending on its wavelength. Researchers at Karlsruhe ...

Engineering

How digital twins could protect manufacturers from cyberattacks

Detailed virtual copies of physical objects, called digital twins, are opening doors for better products across automotive, health care, aerospace and other industries. According to a new study, cybersecurity may also fit ...

Engineering

Your next house could be built by a giant robot

Hugo and Erica Briones, like thousands of other homebuyers in North Texas, are waiting patiently for their new home to be built—but their home is different.

Electronics & Semiconductors

Printable circuits that can work on fabric, plastic and even fruit

Remember iron-on decals? All you had to do was print something out on special paper with a home printer, then transfer it onto a T-shirt using an iron. Now, scientists have developed a very similar scheme, but instead of ...

Engineering

3D printer pushes prototyping boundaries

Making the construction of prototypes more efficient, cost-effective, faster and flexible—this will be possible with the world's largest industrial delta 3D printer. The four-meter-high machine was developed by Professor ...

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Printer (computing)

In computing, a printer is a peripheral which produces a hard copy (permanent human-readable text and/or graphics) of documents stored in electronic form, usually on physical print media such as paper or transparencies. Many printers are primarily used as local peripherals, and are attached by a printer cable or, in most newer printers, a USB cable to a computer which serves as a document source. Some printers, commonly known as network printers, have built-in network interfaces (typically wireless or Ethernet), and can serve as a hardcopy device for any user on the network. Individual printers are often designed to support both local and network connected users at the same time. Chetan

In addition, a few modern printers can directly interface to electronic media such as memory sticks or memory cards, or to image capture devices such as digital cameras, scanners; some printers are combined with a scanners and/or fax machines in a single unit, and can function as photocopiers. Printers that include non-printing features are sometimes called Multifunction Printers (MFP), Multi-Function Devices (MFD), or All-In-One (AIO) printers. Most MFPs include printing, scanning, and copying among their features. A Virtual printer is a piece of computer software whose user interface and API resemble that of a printer driver, but which is not connected with a physical computer printer.

Printers are designed for low-volume, short-turnaround print jobs; requiring virtually no setup time to achieve a hard copy of a given document. However, printers are generally slow devices (30 pages per minute is considered fast; and many inexpensive consumer printers are far slower than that), and the cost per page is actually relatively high. However this is offset by the on-demand convenience and project management costs being more controllable compared to an out-sourced solution.The printing press naturally remains the machine of choice for high-volume, professional publishing. However, as printers have improved in quality and performance, many jobs which used to be done by professional print shops are now done by users on local printers; see desktop publishing. The world's first computer printer was a 19th century mechanically driven apparatus invented by Charles Babbage for his Difference Engine.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA