Course Transcript

CompTIA A+ Exam 220-901: Printers

Introduction to Printers
1. Course Introduction

2. Laser Printer

3. Color and Font for Laser Printers

4. PDLs for Laser Printers

5. Inkjet Printer Functionality

6. Advantages of an Inkjet Printer

7. Thermal Wax Transfer

8. Direct Thermal Printers

Printer Configuration and Networking

1. Local vs. Network Printing

2. Print Server

3. Print Spooler

4. Print Sharing

5. Printer Drivers

6. Printer Configuration

7. Other Printing Options

8. Virtual Printing

9. USB Printers

10. Ethernet-connected Printers

11. Wi-Fi Printing

12. Other Wireless Printing

Practice: Identify Laser Printer Components

1. Exercise: Identify Laser Printer Components
Course Introduction
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
start the course

1.
We still have the need to print. So, in this course, we're going to take a look at the different types of printers that are out there. And Dan Young is
going to discuss all of the different print drivers, the connection options, and what you can do to install a new printer on your devices.
Laser Printer
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe a laser printer

1.
Laser printers are pretty exciting to talk about. And you think, well, are we actually drawing onto the paper with the laser? No, the lasers have an
impact in what is drawn. Certainly, there is a purpose to the laser. What actually affixes itself to the paper is going to be toner. Yes, I've heard that
term toner. We know that we have to replace the toner cartridges. Toner is like ink, okay. So somehow this laser is going to tell us where the ink is
going to go. How does this work? Well, laser is going to draw the picture of what we want line by line, row by row onto the drum. This drum is a
cylinder. A cylinder has an electrical image burned onto it from this laser. It's electrically charged, and it is waiting to pick up other electrically charged
stuff, specifically toner. That drum that has been electrically charged is going to be going through this dirty stuff called toner, and this is going to pick
up an image everywhere that that laser has touched it.

Then we have to fly all that toner off, and I picture the movie "Lost in Space" where all these robots jump off of a ship, and they are going to slam onto
an adjacent ship. That's kind of what is happening here. We have all these little tiny pieces that are going to jump off the ship, off the drum and slam
into the paper that is going through, going through that kind of roller drum, and the corona wire is what reverses the polarity, like in Ghostbusters
when they reverse the polarity to deal with the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Then we burn it into place. We burn it into place with heat and pressure.
We've got to fuse that toner on because really it's not going to stick all that well. So if we were to open up a printer, this is what it might look like. It's
going to go through, okay, it's going to go through, we have got that drum. We've got a laser that is writing on the drum, and the corona wire is what is
taking that information and launching it.

So that corona wire is next to the drum, and it's going to be infusing the paper with what we want to give it, and then it is going to be burned in there.
It's going to be rolled onto it and fused, and then go through the mechanical system and feeds out to the top to the happy person, who just printed out
their TPS report. That's the process of laser printing. It's pretty exciting stuff. Laser printing has been around since I know I was exposed to it in the
80s, and it's still incredibly powerful because it is a scalable technology. It's one of those things where it's very efficient toner, it's not that expensive
as opposed to like ink cartridges, which can be extremely expensive, and these can produce high volumes of output, high volumes of pages per
minute.
Color and Font for Laser Printers
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe the color and font for laser printers

1.
Something that we have to bear in mind is laser printers came out originally for black, but now we have color laser printers. Not all laser printers
these days are color. It takes a lot more engineering to make this work, but we can have color varieties, definitely more expensive. There is also the
thought about fonts. Our printers have internal fonts. We would call those hard fonts, and then there are what are called soft fonts, where this is a font
that is kind of known by our operating system. The operating system, instead of saying, "Hey, print this character in such and such font," it's just going
to show the image, and the image is what is going to print out, and a lot of times that's really what is going to happen these days. We are not going to
be sending a set of instructions on what to print in terms of this font, this color and the size of font, and this character within that font. It's just going to
give a big old image, and it's going to print that image.
PDLs for Laser Printers
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe PDLs for laser printers

1.
Whenever we have information that needs to be rendered in some way, whether that's a web page or something we print out, we have to bear in
mind that there is sometimes a spectrum for interpretation, and this interpretation can cause issues, and so what we have are Page Description
Languages. Page Description Languages basically say, hey, this is exactly how you should interpret what I am trying to print to you. So if we have
things like hard fonts and we are trying to say print it this way, the Printer Control Language, PCL, developed by HP, or PostScript developed by
Apple are going to make sure that it looks the same across all the different printers that we're going to print to. That's one of the challenges that we
used to face more than we do now. The challenge was that, you know, you take this application, this document, you send it to this printer. We get a
different result that sending to another printer. We wanted some consistency, and the consistency is afforded to us by PCL, which is again Printer
Control Language or PostScript, PCL or PostScript, are the Page Description Languages that are the way to control and make our images that are
printed much more consistent.
Inkjet Printer Functionality
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe inkjet printer functionality

1.
If we're not doing laser printing, we are probably doing inkjet printing. Inkjet, my first inkjet printer was called "Bubble Jet", and it is a variant of this
technology, not exactly the same. It is going to spray ionized ink onto a sheet of paper. What is going to happen are these things, magnetized plates,
these guys right here, these magnetized plates are going to allow us to spray and control that spray. Isn't that amazing? You get desired shapes, and
you can also call this ink dispersion. Let's walk you through what happens here. Okay, so the first thing is it's going to come from the reservoir. Ink
needs to live somewhere. It's going to be in our inkjet cartridge that costs us $80. Then it's going to go through a pump, and it's going to go through
piezoelectric crystal. This is an interesting crystal that can change shape with electricity,

and a lot of times, we actually use it to generate electricity. And in this case, we are using the electricity to change the shape of the crystal to make it
expand or contract. And droplets are going to be emitted from this ink nozzle that is being basically we are kind of starting the spray from here, so to
speak. And we have the character generator and the charging tunnel that are going to go through there. We do have to have ionized ink, right, it
needs to be charged. And then these charged deflection plates are being able to print really small images, right. They are able to control it to a
certain degree. So in this case, we can get the letter H as it's going through the printer and that is the process of inkjet printing.
Advantages of an Inkjet Printer
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe the advantages of an inkjet printer

1.
Inkjet printers are certainly more affordable in terms of the printer, but what is happening, the more you understand what is going on with these
printers, a lot of that mechanism is baked inside of that replaced unit. Unit gets replaced as frequently as we exhaust the ink and, yes, you can
replace the ink. Okay, it's a messy process sometimes. So the disadvantage is this is more costly if you do high-volume printing. If you're only doing a
little bit of printing with your inkjet or ink dispersion printer, that's fine, but the higher the volume, the more you're going to pay because you're paying
more on a per-page count here than with laser printer.

You also have disadvantages. You can get smudges a little bit easier, okay. And you know, yes, you can get color, but getting those color ink
cartridges, it's going to come at a price. And I have heard it said, you know, I haven't validated this, but I heard it said that certain types of ink that are
used in this are worth more per ounce than gold. It's kind of scary, isn't it? Now these cartridges are pretty light. They are not like super heavy like a
bar of gold, but still when something is worth more than gold or costs more than gold, you want to think about that a little bit or maybe try to find
something that is going to be a better fit for your needs.
Thermal Wax Transfer
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe thermal wax transfer

1.
A kind of printing that you won't see that much is thermal wax printing. What is happening here is we are actually putting our image, so to speak, in
wax, and it's not like we're at the wax museum. We are putting our image in wax, and then we are going to thermally transfer it onto our paper. It's
kind of like an iron on. It's a very simple process. It's just an iron on, and when cool, the wax is permanent. Practically speaking, you are not going to
use this in an everyday organization.
Direct Thermal Printers
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe direct thermal printers

1.
Do you have any receipts in your wallet? I know that I do. You don't want to see my receipts or my wallet per se as it's a George Costanza wallet. But
if you look at a receipt, a lot of them are printed with direct thermal printing. This is not wax transfer. Don't mistake it as wax transfer. What we have is
our paper. We have our paper, so to speak, and that paper is white or near white. It's kind of a candle white. It's not exactly white. And what you can
do is you can affect it. You can affect it and darken the substrate under the heating element. You know how you have some of those receipts that
don't read as well over time.

Part of the reason why is that this kind of printing is responsive to heat. It responds to heat and, as a result, you can overwrite it with heat, or it kind of
fades over time. I've got these prescription labels for my pills that my dog takes, and you can't even read them if they're a year old. Anyhow, I am still
giving her pills if it's a year old, but that's a story for a different day. So what do we have? We have things like the binder, the color forming layer, the
color developer, the developed area, this dye, and the base on which this lives. What is the takeaway here? Not all of this stuff over here, the
takeaway is we've got a heating element that's able to draw and darken the image through all this good stuff, this technical stuff where it is going to
respond to the heat.
Local vs. Network Printing
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
compare local and network printing

1.
Printers have come a long way over a very short time when it comes to how we connect up. Now what was the first kind of way that we would
connect up a local printer before USB? What was the printer port that we used before Universal Serial Bus? Can you tell me? There is a parallel
printer port. Parallel printer port, that female connection on the back of our computer, 25 pins, we assigned LPT1 to it. So I want you thinking that's
originally how we had local computers. Nowadays USB. For a little while, we also had some SCSI printers. SCSI printers didn't take off that much.
That was another way of connecting, and nowadays, it's over the network. Nowadays, it's over TCP/IP over whether it's Wi-Fi or Ethernet. And some
printers have an Ethernet port, some have Wi-Fi, some have both, and if you are making a purchase nowadays, you probably want at least Wi-Fi, if
not both Wi-Fi and Ethernet. I say Wi-Fi because sometimes you don't want to run an Ethernet cable over there or it's harder to, and it just makes
your life a lot easier if you've got Wi-Fi to use that as your way of communicating the information to the PC or from the PC to the printer.
Print Server
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe a print server

1.
One of the very first purposes of networks, in general, was to share people's locally connected printers. What we would have is a computer that
would have a printer connected up to it, and we would share that. Then came what were called print servers, which were dedicated devices that were
there just to share the printer. So we've got a locally connected printer that is then being shared up by our print server, and anyone who has
connectivity to the network that that device has connectivity to could potentially find it and print to it. So in addition, you could also have a print server
enabled on the printer itself. More intelligent printers can do that. And so this is kind of all about the underlying or first-generation approach of dealing
with printers, sharing a printer, where you had to have a Windows Service file and print sharing enabled. And then you make sure that you have
connectivity locally to that printer, and then you right-click and share that printer in your printer's area, and we are kind of making it so that that's kind
of a thing of the past. So we have more dedicated things like print servers or the printer is network-based natively, which is really where you want to
be most of the time. But if you've got a legacy printer that is still doing a good job for you, and somebody thinks they are very expensive, very
powerful, and still very useful, then you might want to look into a print server for it.
Print Spooler
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe a print spooler

1.
When it comes to printing documents, our printer can only output so much at a time because it can't just shovel it all out as quickly as we sent it. We
sent...like I just sent a 400-page document to a printer the other day and that poor printer, it can't handle that as it can't just output that. It's going to
take some time, and hopefully nobody else printed to it as well. Or what if somebody else did? How is that going to work out? Well, print jobs come
from the applications, whatever it is, and the applications go and send their data to the print spooler. This is a queue. Queue is a holding place that is
lined up, and it's software that is loaded at startup, and it is going to manage the printing process. You can clear from the queue; restart the spooler;
you can reprioritize those jobs; and it is also going to load the correct print driver as it knows what you are trying to send it to.

When you are sending it to the printer, you might have to buffer it. Buffer is basically a memory space. In this case, it's the disk where that data is
stored in readiness for sending to the print device, and that is how this thing called the print spooler plays out in these operating systems. And it's a
pretty important deal, and sometimes you have to access the print spooler, clear things out so that you can get some of the junk out. Sometimes, we
might have sent a job to a printer that was offline, and in all honesty, sometimes that can flick out the print spooler.
Print Sharing
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe print sharing

1.
The first purposes for networking is about file and print sharing. Print sharing specifically is what I want to talk to you about. Basically it says I've a
locally connected-up printer to this computer, and I go into the software or the operating system, and I share that resource. So people who can
establish a connection over the LAN, generally it's over the LAN, I can establish a connection to that and through the added services on top of the
TCP/IP stack gain connectivity to that printer. You can control things like Permissions and things like that. And this is what print sharing is all about,
having multiple users share a single printer, which is nice, because not everybody has or needs a printer by their desk. And so we can instead have
fewer printers, maybe better printers, more efficient laser printers and be more efficient in terms of space. Instead of having a printer on your desk,
now you can have an aquarium or a potted plant, and so it's good all around.

What's interesting is we don't do this anymore. We don't do it a lot anymore because most of our printers and all of the newer printers have the
network intelligence to directly connect up to the network. However, if you do want to manage the Permissions and say who can print to this like, let's
say...let's say we've got a color laser printer. Color laser printers are something that you do want to control. You don't want to wind up having a
hundred thousand dollars lost because everybody was printing to the color laser printer, jobs that should not have been sent to the color laser printer
in your organization. And you know, maintaining printers can be costly when it comes to things like color toner and things like that. So just bear in
mind that there is a cost per page, and the cost per page for color printers is generally higher than it is for black and white laser printing.
Printer Drivers
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe printer drivers

1.
In whatever operating system you are using, you need drivers for all of the external components. Printers are no exception, and so when you are
adding a new printer to the computer, you need to make sure that the drivers are there. Where do you get drivers? Well, you might get them from the
installation media. Oftentimes, I don't even open up the installation media. I'm going to go and I'm going to say, you know what, I am just going to
download it from the web. I want to get the latest and greatest. Bear in mind, by the way, that sometimes you get very large extra applications that go
along with it, and you just want to be cognizant of the fact that sometimes you can get more than what you ask for. You can get all their added
intelligence to manage the printer that will tell you where the ink levels are and things like that, and sometimes you don't want to get into that game.

You can also use that software though for troubleshooting. It will tell you, oh, you know what, it can actually read from the ink cartridge, and it's going
to tell you exactly what kind of level is in the reservoirs that you have. It is also possible that you will have to uninstall and reinstall printer drivers.
Let's say that that was kind of a thing that we had to do in the 90s more so than now. I don't want to rule it out though, but reinstalling printer drivers is
an unusual thing as opposed to in the past, incredibly normal. Like when stuff got in the print spooler, sometimes we would have to do this, or at least
I would go through that in order to solve the problem. I am not sure if that was the right way, but nowadays, dealing with the printer driver is a once-
and-done thing. You're probably not going to have to revisit drivers once they are up and running.
Printer Configuration
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe printer configuration

1.
When we are setting up our printer, we have to think about how this is going to be configured. So after we install the drivers through the software
granted to us by probably the installation media or direct download from the web site, I think to myself, alright, what are the sorts of things that I am
going to be affecting for our computer, for our printer specifically? So let's say we've got an Officejet 8600. Great, Officejet, an HP device. Well what
can I affect? I can affect duplex printing. Duplex or simplex? Simplex, single sided; duplex, double sided. Collating. Being able to print lots of, like,
one multipage document multiple times and then be able to actually collate them, you know. Imagine a room where people manually collate by
printing the first page 100 times, the second page 100 times, the third page 100 times; putting out stacks and then people just, you know, walk
around and then pick up one page from each stack and staple them together; bind them however they want.

And there is page Orientation. Page Orientation, we've got Portrait or Landscape. What's the default? The default is going to be Portrait. It's going to
be that vertical page, you know, the 8.5x11 piece of paper. But if you want Landscape – maybe you're printing a picture that needs to be Landscape –
that would also be a choice. Then we have print quality. Print quality is subtly affected by our Quality Settings. What this is going to do is it's going to
slow down our print, take a little bit more time to maybe not dump as much ink to cover as much of the page as possible. We're going to take a little
bit more time to be a little bit more granular if we want to go Best, if we just have a Draft, or maybe you even have a Custom setting. But generally,
the choices that we care about are here. This is not going to make the biggest difference. If you were tasked with improving picture quality for
something, this would be a minor incremental step. But things like the paper that we use and doing an ink head cleaning are probably going to be
more impactful to quality than this Quality Setting. But if I am printing a picture and I want the best possible quality and I know I've done all the other
things to get the best possible quality like using the right printer, paper, then choose this as well to get a better quality of print job.
Other Printing Options
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe other printing options

1.
It's amazing these devices that we hold in our hands, these tablets, and our cell phones that we hold in our hands. How do we print from them? They
are awesome at browsing the web. But what if we want to print out those driving directions instead of having them read to us? What if we want to
print out a coupon? What do we do to print from something like an iPhone? What do we do? Well there are a lots of different things we can do. Cloud
printing. What this is going to do is it's going to take a cloud printer. Now this cloud printer is not living in the cloud. It has connectivity to the cloud,
okay. So it is going to have a session to maybe Google's Cloud Print service. And this printer would have to have that sort of capability, okay. Think of
that almost like a Netflix-connected device getting a, sort of, connection to the cloud, okay. Now then what we can do is we can tie in on our cell
phone to the Cloud Print service, print from there – it speaks to the cloud. Then that is fed to our printer. Amazing stuff, right? Really, really cool.
There is also a TCP-based printing that we can take advantage of. This is the standard sort of connectivity. Any network based, any general network
based in Windows print job is going to be over TCP printing.

Now there is another service that is out there that is based on a common set of technologies, including Automatic Private IP Addressing. This is the
168 address space for IP. It's a self-assigned address space. And what it is there for is network connectivity that requires no human intervention at all.
Now it's really, really limited. You cannot use this to communicate beyond the local subnet. You can't go out to the Internet – things like that. And so,
we have two, we have Bonjour, which is Apple's implementation of zero config, Zeroconf, which takes advantage of APIPA. And that could be used to
print. Now there is also AirPrint. Now this is not a Zeroconf service. There's a lot of Air x in Apple. There is AirPlay. AirPlay allows us to communicate
over the Wi-Fi network audio. And so I can have a Wi, I can have an AirPlay speaker. So if we take that, that similar functionality, and just replace the
word "Play" with "Print", AirPrint is a way of wirelessly printing from things like our iPhone or an iPad.
Virtual Printing
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe virtual printing

1.
Do you ever want to save a document? And you're not exactly sure how to best save it because, let's say, it's an HTML page. If you have an HTML
page, you can, you know, save that to your desktop. But it may not render as well when you reopen it. So how do you make a document that you
might be able to view into a file that you can review at a later time without actually printing it because you could definitely print and that will render it
and it'll, you know, make a hard copy? Well we can do virtual printing. And so what we can do is we can output to something like a PDF or an XPS
file, and that allows us to output those files to a computer, reopen them. They're going to look perfect. We can also output to standard image formats
where we might have to download a little extra software in order to print to image, but that's also a possibility. So let's say you're doing expense
reports and you want to print a receipt that you got on your e-mail account. You could go and set up an image-printing service and print to one of
these files. So these are the kind of the standard image file types that might be associated with image printing.
USB Printers
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe USB printers

1.
If we are connecting up a local printer to our computer, it's probably going to be USB, probably USB 2.0 is going to be the standard printer
connection, and we can see exactly that. No surprise that our standard printer connectivity is going to be USB, but we don't want to rule out the fact
that we have parallel printer ports, these D-type 25-pin, be able to recognize this thing and understand that it is going to be taking a LPT resource. By
the way, a little bit of good information on the page that gives us some new information is the fact that we had a transition back in the parallel printer
port days. It used to be that we would only output data from the parallel printer port, and it was just a parallel cable. And they switched it to a
bidirectionality, so you could read information from the printer like get status messages and things like that, or they also used this for scanning.

So if you had like an OfficeJet that has an integrated scanner, you could use this port for scanning purposes as well. And you can see a little bit of the
decode for the parallel printer port. You can see control lines, status lines, data lines. I wouldn't expect anyone to remember that, but it's good to
understand that it is carved up into different blocks. Retaining specifics like that though are not going to be something that I would expect of an A+
candidate.
Ethernet-connected Printers
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe Ethernet-connected printers

1.
When we think about network printers, I want you thinking, yes, we could connect up to a print server, whether that's a dedicated computer that has
file and print sharing or a box that is specifically designed for it. That would be one kind. The other kind would be directly connected via a NIC, which
could be a wireless NIC like 802.11, or it could be Ethernet.
Wi-Fi Printing
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe Wi-Fi printing

1.
The most common kind of wireless printer that we would run into is going to off of your typical Wi-Fi, your 802.11x, for instance, and if you have older
printers, maybe "g" or "b", maybe even "a". You could have a Bluetooth printer. If I am dealing with a Bluetooth printer, it might be because I have a
printer that's specifically designed for PDA for my phone. I wouldn't expect to use a Bluetooth printer on just an everyday setup, okay. There is also
Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, Epson iPrint, HP ePrint, okay, that's getting kind of into the weeds, but it's good to have exposure that there are
other kinds of ways to print over a network and, you know, those are examples of that. By the way, you can print from some mobile devices. So
you've got your iPhone, for instance, running iOS and you have a Bluetooth connection, think about that. We've got the means of communicating.
We've got an operating system and a device that supports Bluetooth. Hey, we've got most of the stuff in place. So you can actually print from your
iPhone. It's not just a way of taking selfies, or making calls, or sending texts, or running apps. You can actually print from things like iOS devices,
Android devices, or even like a Windows phone. Not a real surprise if you've got a Windows phone, it would be pretty self-evident that that would be
able to print.

Let's talk about Wi-Fi for a moment. When we think about wireless printers, what is this thing called Wi-Fi? I heard it used erroneously on an ad, and
honestly I was really kind of appalled. Wi-Fi is not your Internet. It is a wireless LAN. It's a wireless LAN that enables things to connect up to what is
called an access point, which is kind of like a wireless hub per se, okay. And Wi-Fi is specifically talking about kind of all things 802.11. That's really
how I want you to think about it. You go, "Hey, Dan, what's Wi-Fi?" I'm going to say it's all things 802.11, what I just said. Well, what does that mean?
Well, it's these wireless standards, which include how these access points are going to communicate. It includes the way that we affect the radio
waves and how we encode our data on the radio waves, how we work with specific frequencies. It defines our frequencies, all those things. It defines
how we work with the antenna and communicate via radio, all that stuff. But it basically is a way of sending data frames over radio frequencies.

And the two most popular standards are 802.11b and 802.11n. Now "a" was kind of a flash in the pan; "a" took over kind of the same time as "g"; "b"
was the first Wi-Fi standard that really took off though, but it's only 11 megabytes per second. Then we had the "g" standard, which was 54
megabytes per second, pretty decent. We're going to be able to watch video on it, so okay, and then the much faster 802.11n standard. Those are
Wi-Fi standards. And nowadays, a lot of printers can connect up directly to the access point, okay. A lot of times the printer connects up directly to the
access point. It's also possible that a print server could connect up to the access point as well, but there are a lot of different ways of using one of
these Wi-Fi networks.
Other Wireless Printing
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
describe other methods of wireless printing

1.
When we think about Bluetooth, Bluetooth sets up what is called a personal area network, as opposed to Wi-Fi, which sets up a local area network, a
wireless local area network specifically. Bluetooth works by pairing devices up to one another. You have like an Xbox 360. Well, you had controllers
that you had to pair up to the base station, and I think that's true for probably PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4, and things like that. So have you ever
paired up things in your home? Well, that's kind of what you are doing here if you are pairing up a Bluetooth printer with your computer. Now desktop
computers don't always have Bluetooth integrated into them. You can absolutely add it. USB Bluetooth ports are in abundance, but I would want you
to understand that you could also do this Bluetooth with integrated Bluetooth, you will have in most tablets and cell phones. So it is possible to print,
and if so, printing from your phone or your tablet is probably the easiest way to print if you aren't trying to do one of the cloud-based printing services.

Theoretically, you can print using infrared as your data transmission modality. Now I would want you to understand you are never going to use this.
So let's just make sure that we are clear, it's not applicable. But in any testing environment, there is just a little bit to know about infrared. First how do
you send it? Well, it's just like your remote control. You've got maybe an LED that is going to be sending out a subvisible light, and we can see that
we've got things like the visible spectrum here, okay. Infrared is over here. Ultraviolet is over here. We are not sending ultraviolet. We are sending
infrared, okay. What do we have to know? We send this from LEDs. It gets bounced with mirrors, and you need line of sight. No line of sight, no
infrared. You can, by the way, use this for parallel printer ports. This was common maybe back in the early 90s, and we have to understand that
sometimes we talk about technologies that are not used nowadays. It's good to know the history. So infrared printing, probably a thing of the past for
you, and it's good to have exposures to the needs for things like line of sight and the way that it falls into the visible or actually nonvisible light
spectrum.

Have you ever seen these ads for where people touched devices and somehow we just shared the playlists between them? Well, that's related to
what is called near field communication. Where do you hear that word or those words? Near field communication. Basically it is the act of bringing
two devices together running NFC and by doing that, pairing them up. I will like that because Bluetooth pairing takes a little bit of added effort. Now
this Bluetooth pairing is not awful. It is a beautifully baked technology in fact. But this is a set of protocols that says, you know what, you get them
close to one another within 10 centimeters, 10 centimeters, so about that big, okay, and they pair up and it communicates at a rate that is acceptable
for printing. 106 kbps, that is just fine for sending to your printer. So this might be a way that you are going to connect up to the printer, yes, pair them
up with NFC and away you go with your print job.
Exercise: Identify Laser Printer Components
Learning Objective
After completing this topic, you should be able to
identify laser printer components

1.
Exercise Overview
I can still remember when I was first hearing about laser printers, and it was back in the 80s, and people were explaining it to me and I thought that
laser printers were shining laser beams on a piece of paper and basically burning it in, but you know that's not the case. So what is the case? How do
all of the components work together? So let's work these out. Here we've got four different elements of a laser printer. Go ahead and identify what the
name is or what is being described. Pause right now, give it your best shot, and we'll come back and go over these together.

Solution
Alright, so how many of these did you answer? First one, component creates a pattern on the drum. Well, that's actually the "Laser". Then we have
something that is going to bond the toner to the paper. So we're doing this is a little out of order, okay. Let's see if we can figure out the order here.
This component lands the toner on the paper. This component receives the toner from the toner cartridge. Okay, so the first thing we're going to have
is laser happening and that creates kind of a space on the drum that is going to receive the toner cartridge. So I'm going to...going to "Drum" next,
okay. And then we're going to have to send the toner on to the paper. So what is going to happen there, we have this "Corona wire", which is going to
take advantage of the charge of the toner and move it from the drum to the paper, and then we have to "Fuse"...we have to fuse the toner on to the
paper. So those are the different components of the laser printer.

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