IT Printer Technology

Difference Between Thermal Printer and Inkjet Printer

Thermal Printer vs Inkjet Printer

Summary: Difference Between Thermal Printer and Inkjet Printer is that tan image is generated in thermal printer by pushing electrically heated pins against heat-sensitive paper. While Ink-jet printer is a type of non-impact printer which sprays tiny drops of liquid ink onto a piece of paper to form graphics and characters.

Difference Between Thermal Printer and Inkjet Printer

Thermal Printer

An image is generated in thermal printer by pushing electrically heated pins against heat-sensitive paper. Standard thermal printers are inexpensive but the print quality in them is low and images tend to fade after some time. Self-service gas pumps usually use built-in low-quality thermal printer to give us gas receipts. Many retail and grocery stores and point-of-sale terminals also prints purchase receipts on thermal paper.

But some thermal printers have high quality printing technology and they can print much faster rates than laser printers and ink-jet printers. Dye-sublimation printer also known as digital photo printer use heat to transfer colored dye to coated paper. Different professional applications that require high quality image, such as photography studios, security identifications systems and medical labs use dye-sublimation printers. There high-end printers print images in a wide range of sizes and cost thousands of dollars.

Dye-sublimation printers when used by home user or small business user, they typically print images in one or two sizes and they are much slower than the professional printers.  You can compare these lower-end dye-sublimation printers to a photo printer in cost and they are based on ink-jet printers.

 

Inkjet Printer

Ink-jet printer is a type of non-impact printer which sprays tiny drops of liquid ink onto a piece of paper to form graphics and characters. They become very popular in color printers for use in home. They produce graphics and text in both black-and-white and can produce color text and graphics on different variety of papers. Reasonable ink-jet printer costs less than $100.

The quality of an ink-jet printer can be determined by its resolution. Printer resolution can be measured by measuring the number of dots per inch (dpi) a printer can print. Most printers can print 1200-4800 dpi. And the speed of an ink-jet printer is measured by number of pages per minute (ppm) it can print. The speed of most ink-jet printers is from 12-36 ppm but they print graphics and colors at a slower rate.

Print head mechanism used in ink-jet printer contains ink-filled cartridges, in which each cartridge has fifty to hundreds of small ink holes or nozzles. The ink is released through any of the nozzles to form desired image or character on paper. When the cartridge is out of ink you, the cartridge is simply replaced by new cartridge. Most ink-printers have two or more ink cartridges: one cartridge contains only black ink and other cartridges contain colors. The number of ink cartridge a printer require and the cost of the cartridge are two things you need to consider when purchasing a printer. Some buyers reduce the expense of cartridges by purchasing refilled or empty cartridges refilled by a third party vendor.

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