I happened to walk by when the office fax machine was getting a new "ribbon" the other day. Over the years I've seen many methods of getting ink from a print head onto a piece of paper, but this one takes the cake.
The printer has one huge ribbon (8.5 inches wide by who-knows-how-many-feet-long) which the print head whacks against the paper. Here you can see some fax spam in reverse, as all of the whacked ink was removed from the ribbon. One line of fax (empty or not) per line of ribbon.
One benefit, or disadvantage, to this approach is that every fax you get can be read from the ribbon. You could store the old ribbons in a safe for future reference rather than filing away reams of paper. For that matter it probably doesn't need any paper, just scroll back through the ribbon every once in a while to see what you've been faxed.
Other methods of printing:
- print head heats thermally sensitive paper: fun for science/art projects
- thin ribbon moves one character at a time under impact print head
- paper electrostatically charged by print head laser/light, ink sticks to charged spots and is fused on by heat
- microscopic jets of ink squirted onto paper (or microscopic hot wax)
- ink pen(s) on a servo-controlled plotter carriage
- "routing" material away (ie. wood printing)
Can you think of others?
2 comments
permanent link
email this
Your #2 up there encompasses a lot of ground, including variations of the thin ribbon being an impermeable plastic with a thin layer of single use ink (ala your fax machine, but narrower), or the ribbon being a fabric with a liquid ink; and variations of the striking device from a belt with characters on it to a ball with characters on it to individual arms for each character to a row of pins which make up pixels.
And I've used printers which used rotating drums of negatives of the character set and a strobe light to expose black and white photographic paper (old CompuGraphic typesetters), and printers which used scanning lasers to expose color photographic paper (assorted modern photo printers).
How about braille printers, which poke holes in the paper?
And all of these technologies are just for one-offs. Where multiple copies are useful (and I mention these because sometimes recycling old ideas in new contexts works) there's the increasingly misleadingly named (because there's rarely stone involved nowadays) lithography, which I suppose is really now called offset printing, there's fixed raised type with ink rolled over the top of it before it's pressed on to the paper, and there's embossed printing, with negative and a positive raised plates that deform the paper.
Right you are, Dan, thanks for the additions.
And I forgot all about carving the flat side of a potato, dipping it in ink, and stomping it all over things.
Don't forget Hektor, the computer controlled can of spray paint:
http://www.hektor.ch/