Printers are tricky, out of all the computer parts that you could possibly have, a printer is one of the most difficult, expensive, and hard to update and care for. In today's society, with the rapid growth of technology and their functions, printers need to keep up. Manufacturers need to keep up with this growth, by adding speed to the printer, or adding scanners, photo printers, Bluetooth, memory card slots, mini display screens, higher printing quality, and many more things.

There are mainly 2 different types of printers, laser printers, and inkjet printers. We will run through both of them now. Laser printers are a much higher speed than the inject printers. They use a roller, or so to call it, that is electronically charged, this is coated with selenium. Photoconductivity then removes the areas that are electronically charged, but only on the areas where there is light, this roller then passes the ink which attaches itself to the electrified areas and is rolled against paper, with direct contact and heat the ink is put onto the paper. Laser printers can print up to 47 color pages per minute, and 88 black and white pages per minute.

Companies generally use these to make bulk personal mail, such as bills. Inkjet printers, these are the most common of all printers because of their simplicity and ease of use. An example of this is that you don't need to replace the head on the printer, this allows for more expensive higher quality heads for printing, and not required for calibration, also giving higher quality images.

On the other hand if it breaks it would be cheaper to just replace the whole printer. The way an inkjet printer works is it has a microscopic needle, that supplies a continuous flow of ink onto a page, from 64,000 to 165,000 drops per second, making a crystal clear images. These work a lot like a tattoo gun, just the needle does not vibrate and there is a continuous flow of ink. Instead they use an ink that, once applied to the page, it dries at a rapid rate, staining the page.

Scanners, most home printers come with scanners, these are particularly useful when it comes to making copies of a certain document, most printers come with an internal memory, this allows you to load the image or file onto the printer and allows the printer to print without the help of the computer.

Scanners also come into use when you want to put an image onto a computer, it scans the image, and sends it through to the supplied software that decodes it and then displays it for plain view on your computer screen. Scanners can take amazingly high resolution pictures of the said object. You could put your finger onto the scanner, scan it, change the quality settings, scan it again and be able to see the smallest piece of dirt that was put between your finger print. Some scanners also automatically crop pictures for you.