Impact Printers

 These printers print with striking of hammers or pins on ribbon. These printers can print on multi-part (using carbon papers) by using mechanical pressure. For example, Dot Matrix printers and Line matrix printers are impact printers.

 A Dot matrix printer that prints using a fixed number of pins or wires. Each dot is produced by a tiny metal rod, also called a “wire” or “pin”, which works by the power of a tiny electromagnet or solenoid, either directly or through a set of small levers. It generally prints one line of text at a time. The printing speed of these printers varies from 30 to 1550 CPS (Character Per Second).

Line matrix printers use a fixed print head for printing. Basically, it prints a page-wide line of dots. But it builds up a line of text by printing lines of dots. Line printers are capable of printing much more than 1000 Lines Per Minute, resulting in thousands of pages per hour. These printers also uses mechanical pressure to print on multi-part (using carbon papers).