Print Devices

Print devices are the machines we call "printers." They produce hardcopy output by interpreting the printer language and creating a bitmap for each page.

Print devices have their own input and output channels; jobs can be directed to input channels such as parallel or serial cables or network adapters. Output can be produced on different media, including paper, film, or fabric.

Print devices have their own internal processors which can be proprietary or general-purpose (such as the Motorola 680xx-series chips in Apple LaserWriter devices). Incoming data is stored in the print-device RAM, which can range from a few bytes to a hundred megabytes. Each print device has software stored in ROM, called "firmware," which interprets the programming language of a print job's source code. Examples of programming languages are PostScript, PCL, and HP-GL/2.