Solid ink printers, also known as phase-change printers, are a type of thermal transfer printer.They use solid sticks of CMYK-coloured ink, similar in consistency to candle wax, which are melted and fed into a piezo crystal operated print-head. The printhead sprays the ink on a rotating, oil coated drum.
Solid ink printers are most commonly used as colour office printers, and are excellent at printing on transparencies and other non-porous media.
- although such prints should be called printouts. The introduction of computer techniques and digital printing to printers has meant that printing is also often understood as printing done on an industrial scale by means of adapted printing machines.
Laser printing is an electrostatic digital printing process..It produces high-quality text and graphics (and moderate-quality photographs) by repeatedly passing a laser beam back and forth over a negatively charged cylinder called a "drum" to define a differentially charged image.1 The drum then selectively collects electrically charged powdered ink (toner), and transfers the image to paper, which is then heated in order to permanently fuse the text, imagery, or both.
As with digital photocopiers, laser printers employ a xerographic printing process.However, laser printing differs from analog photocopiers in that the image is produced by the direct scanning of the medium across the printer's photoreceptor.This enables laser printing to copy images more quickly than most photocopiers.Źródło: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_printing