Chapter 17: Printers^407
A Quick Look at Printer Characteristics
The terms used to describe the characteristics of a printer are essentially the same for all
printer types. The following sections describe each of the major characteristics used to de-
fine and describe the capabilities of a printer.Type Quality
Printers are compared to the standard of the typewriter and daisy wheel printer that create
a printed character by striking a solid character form through a ribbon onto the paper. The
typequalityissuewasfirstdevelopedtodescribetherangeofcapabilitiesofdotmatrixprint-
ers, which varied depending on the number and pattern of pins used to form characters.
The type qualities most commonly used to describe a printer are as follows: Draft quality A printer with a draft type quality rating produces low quality
print in which the dots or print elements used to form the characters are indi-
vidually visible on the page. Figure 17-5 illustrates a draft quality character in
comparison to the other type qualities. Low-end inkjet and dot matrix printers
produce draft quality type.
Near letter quality (NLQ) This type quality is somewhere between letter and
draft. NLQ is considered good enough not to be draft quality, but because the
dots or elements used to form the characters are partially visible, it cannot be
considered letter quality type. Printing the character twice with the second pass
slightly offset from the first produces an NLQ character. The results look some-
thing like the example in Figure 17-5. Inkjets and dot matrix printers that print
at 150dpi use NLQ as their type quality default.
Letter quality (LQ) The best type quality a printer can produce. A printer with
a letter quality rating is able to produce characters that appear to have been created
by a typewriter or a solid character form. Daisy wheel, high-end inkjet, dot matrix,
and laser printers produce letter quality type. Letter quality print requires a printer
capable of producing 300 dots per inch (dpi), which is a print quality measurement
used on inkjets and dot matrix printers. Letter quality characters appear to be solid
without any gaps appearing, like the example shown in Figure 17-5.Print Speed
The print speed of a printer is measured in characters or pages. The print speed rating used
for printers that form characters one at a time, such as daisy wheel and dot matrix printers,
is characters per second (cps). The rating used for inkjet and laser printers is pages per min-
ute (ppm). Large printers, such as the printers used with mainframe computers (line print-
ers), that print an entire line at once, use lines per minute as their print speed rating.
Daisy wheel printers are by far the slowest, with a top print speed of around 30 char-
acters per second. Line printers are the fastest at around 3,000 print lines per minute,