Even in today’s digital world, hard copies of documents are extremely important in nearly every industry. Whenever customers need tangible evidence that something happened or a ready reminder that a payment is due, printed sheets are always going to be up to the task. That’s why the following advancements are taking the world by storm even as information technology pundits continue to push for the advent of the paperless office.
Printing Technologies that Pair Easily
Conventional printing technology doesn’t always want to interface with computers, which has led to a number of jokes among IT staffers. These jokes have stuck around in spite of the fact that the days of parallel port errors and line printing mishaps are long gone. Network printers that leverage the power of standard transmission control protocol packets used to send web traffic are easy to link up to. In many cases, no specialized drivers are even necessary to work with them. Printers that are easy to connect to can become popular for both offices and dorms alike.
Client machines only have to add a single hub to their network neighborhood in order to print to these devices. That makes it easy to connect laptops and workstations to them even if they run some kind of open-source operating system. It’s also great news for those who want to take advantage of the latest advances even if they’ve gone to an all-mobile computing platform. This is great news considering some of the new features that have come around in recent quarters.
How Printer Technology is Evolving
Connectivity isn’t the only area where printers are getting easier to use. Front-to-back registration has traditionally been complicated, but modern laser and inkjet machines can go through a series of multiple passes that completely eliminate the need for shuffling pages around. Automatic color detection uses machine learning to check for the density of different layers of toner, thus making it possible to produce photographic-quality prints using only a single pass. Together, these two technologies are making the prospect of printing sophisticated layouts a one-click affair.
Some newer machines can shoot hard copies out at a rate of around 100 pages per minute while others utilize electrophotographic cells that translate raster bitmaps into a five-color print that looks as good as those created by dedicated photoduplication equipment. Water-based inkjet systems combine several different colors together to produce a more vibrant series of hues than you’d ever expect from a traditional impact printer. In some cases, these are actually capable of producing more hues than the human eye can even perceive.
Label printing and other niche applications of this technology have enjoyed these benefits as well. While those who are putting together simple decals might not need every feature that a complicated layout machine has to offer, they’ll still appreciate the fast speeds and low error rates boasted by modern printers. Best of all, they’ll never again have to worry about whether or not their computers are going to sync up to the intimidating machine that’s sitting off in one distant corner of their office.
