Color Printer

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What Does Color Printer Mean?

A color printer is a printer that allows for pages or other items to be printed in color. Like color televisions and other types of equipment and consumer products, color printers have evolved over a number of decades to offer more high-performance and sophisticated results.

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Techopedia Explains Color Printer

Color printers are available in various types of engineered models. For instance, one modern type of color printer is an inkjet printer. An inkjet printer sprays small bits of ink onto paper in very specific ways to create high-resolution color results.

Another type of modern color printer is a laser printer. Here, color is added to the page, not through the mechanical application of ink, but by electrical charges that create the patterns for printing. With laser printers, a laser beam hits against a cylinder called a photoreceptor, which maps out the image to be constructed on the page through the use of powdered substances called toner.

Modern color printers also often function as copiers, fax machines and scanners. Modern features include wireless printing, the ability to create digital images of paper pages and higher-resolution print results.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.