An LED printer uses LEDs to flash a page image onto a photosensitive drum, attracting toner to charged areas. They are cheaper and more reliable than laser printers, but have lower resolution and can produce blurry images. However, as of 2011, their output quality is essentially indistinguishable from laser printers.
Using light-emitting diode (LED) technologies, an LED printer is a piece of computer hardware that uses a non-impact method of putting images and text on paper. Like a laser printer, an LED printer uses toner and heat to accomplish this. LED printers, on the other hand, have fewer moving parts than laser printers and should, in theory, prove more reliable over time.
The page image is sent to the LED printer processor, which controls an array of LEDs. The LEDs flash the page image, line by line, onto a photosensitive drum, which picks up an electrical charge where the light strikes it, and then rolls in contact with the printer’s toner cartridge. Toner is a fine powder that is attracted to charged areas of the drum. The drum then rotates and contacts the paper where the toner settles. After the paper has passed through a high-temperature fuser which fuses the toner to the paper, the printed page comes out.
LED printers use an array of LEDs with a single LED for each image. For example, a printer with a resolution of 600 dots per inch (dpi) and a print area 8 cm (20 inches) wide would have 4,800 LEDs. These are cheap to produce and extremely reliable, with useful lives estimated in the thousands of hours. In a laser printer, the drum is illuminated by a moving laser beam whose light passes through rotating mirrors and lenses. The complexity of this system tends to make laser printers noisier, more expensive, and less reliable.
Printer technology using LEDs has historically had a number of drawbacks resulting from the use of a fixed array of LEDs. The practicalities of manufacturing have made it difficult to make LEDs small enough for LED printers to exceed 600dpi resolution, while laser printers easily exceed 1,200dpi. Also, because LEDs can’t always flash quickly and cleanly enough and have a tendency to produce blurry printed images they can’t match the sharpness of a laser printer.
As of late 2011, LED printers have an output quality that is essentially indistinguishable from laser printers. In fact, because they look and act like laser printers, many retailers mislabel them as laser printers. That said, many users have started unknowingly integrating LED printing technology into their homes and offices.
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