Explain the three main types of Non Impact printers.

The three main types of Non Impact printers are:

1. Thermal Printers — Thermal printers use a special heat sensitive paper. Characters are formed when heated elements come in contact with the heat sensitive paper, thus forming darkened dots. The standard of print produced is poor. Thermal printers are widely used in battery powered equipments, such as portable calculators.
2. Ink-jet Printers — They produce images by spraying tiny droplets of ink onto the paper. They have very high quality output and can also produce coloured graphics. These printers are less noisy. The average quality of inkjet printers is 300 dpi (dots per inch). They use coloured cartridges which combine magenta, yellow, and cyan inks to create colour tones. A black cartridge is also used for crisp monochrome output. They are cheap and ideal for home/office.
3. Laser Printers — Laser printers use photocopy technology to print. They use a laser beam and dry powdered ink to produce a fine dot matrix pattern. The quality of output on paper is very good. They can also produce very high quality images. They are mostly used for DTP (Desktop Publishing) purpose. They can print about 6 to 10 pages per minute. They have a very high resolution ranging from 600-1200 dpi (dots per inch).