The printing industry has evolved rapidly over the last several decades, seeing many amazing improvements. That has certainly happened in the world of thermal printers, a type of printer that uses heat to transfer ink on a page.

These printers have become much more efficient and advanced in recent years. They print at a much higher speed than they used to do. This has allowed them to print more pages per minute, and they have also become cheaper, making them more accessible to a wider audience.

We’ve explained how thermal printers work, but now it’s time to explain what exactly are thermal printers used for.

Thermal printers come in two different types: ones that print in monochrome, and the ones that print in color. Thermal printers which print in black and white are much more common and are used in various different industries.

There are also two different printing technologies used in thermal printers: one uses a direct transfer printing technology and the other uses a thermal transfer.

Thermal printers are mostly used to print barcodes, receipts, invoices, shipping labels, tickets, business cards, stickers, and more. When you visit a company that makes products or a store that sells goods, you usually find a printer near the receptionist or at the counter. A lot of companies use thermal printers for this purpose.

Thermal printers are compact and able to print different sizes of barcodes, labels, and receipts, and therefore they are a very convenient solution. The fields that mostly use thermal printers are food packaging, apparel manufacturing, pharmaceutical industry, electronics, transportation industry, and so on.

Thermal printers that print in color are used to print logos, images, graphics, and other content. This requires a special paper, vinyl, or film that allows it to be transferred from the thermal printer to the item. The material does not fade or change color, unlike what happens when inkjet printers are used.

Printers have become an important piece of equipment in almost any office or home office in the world. From the invention of the printing press almost 6 centuries ago to the 3d printers we use nowadays, a lot has changed in the world of printers. Printers have become smaller and printing speeds much faster. 

The evolution of printers brought with it a lot of fun facts about them. Some of them are crazy, some of them are amazing and some are downright unbelievable. In this article, you will learn a lot of fun facts about printers, like which were the biggest and smallest ones ever produced, how much energy they use and so on. 

If that sounds good, let’s hop into it and learn about the 10 fun facts about printers:

• World’s largest printer has a size of 59 ft in length. 

The newest record holder of the world’s largest printer goes to the Dip-Tech AR18000 digital ceramic in-glass printer. There are only two of them in the world, and are capable of printing a pane of glass that covers up a 690 ft square area! However, it doesn’t print paper, rather glass, but the printing process behind it is quite similar. See glass printing in action on another Dip-Tech printer, called the Dip-Tech DX-3, below.

• The largest 3D printer in the world can print objects that are up to 100 ft long.

3D printers are a giant step in the evolution of printers and a giant step in the evolution of technology. They are now in usage everywhere, from home offices to large 3D printers found in large corporations. However, those can’t compare in size to this absolute monster of a 3D printer. 

Researched for 15 years by the University of Maine and unveiled by them, the largest 3D printer in the world can print pieces that are up to 22 x 100 x 10 ft in size. It can print a one-piece boat! 

• The smallest mobile color printer is just 72 x 51 x 68mm in size

Made by a company called PrinCube, the world’s smallest mobile printer is designed to be portable and fit in a pocket. It weighs only 160 g which also makes it the world’s lightest printer. The most amazing thing about this tiny printer is that it can print on any material, not just on paper!

• World’s smallest all-in-one printer is the HP Deskjet 3755

All-in-one printers have gained a ton of popularity over the years because of their multiple abilities besides printing alone. They are usually big, but HP released the Deskjet 3755, dubbed the “world’s smallest all-in-one printer” which is just 15.86″ x 6.97″ x 5.55″ in size.

HP Deskjet 3755

• Fuser rollers heat up to nearly 400°F!

Fuser units (two fuser rollers) are parts found on the inside of the printer and they are responsible for melting the toner particles and heating the paper, making the paper itself quite hot when it gets out of the printer.

Fuser roller

• Toner melts at a much lower temperature

When you are thinking about fuser rollers heating to such abnormal temperatures, you would think that the toners melt at those similar temperatures, but that is actually not the case. Put the toner below some slightly more heated water and you could see it melting. Crazy, right?

• Laser printer actually uses much more energy than your PC

Even though it’s much smaller than the PC, when printing, a laser printer uses as much as three times more energy than a regular desktop PC.

• The fastest printer on the planet can print up to 150 pages in one minute!

Made by a brand called RISO, their ComColor 9050 printer can print 150 colored prints in a minute. That is blazing fast. Compare it to the regular laser printers, which can print 20 or slightly more pages per minute, depending on the model, and this fact becomes even more amazing.

• 3 Times the Earth can be circled over:

by discarded and unrecycled printer cartridges. That is a crazy fact, and a pretty sad and terrible one, since printer cartridges are a tremendous threat to the Earth’s whole environment.

Bonus fact: The world’s most expensive printer is the IBM Infopoint 2085, which costs slightly more than 30000$! It’s an absolutely massive printer and it means serious business. Nothing like those printers made for home offices that you can get for under $150.

The turning point in history was the invention of the printing press by the German inventor, Johannes Gutenberg around 1440. Those were big, bulky machines that helped to propel mass communication and made big changes to the evolution of society in general. That is known as the Printing Revolution. Safe to say, a lot has changed since then, and now you can have wireless and 3d printers in the comfort of your own home.

The invention of inkjet printing in 1950 helped a lot if the efforts to bring printing to everyone and from that moment, the evolution of printing and printers just skyrocketed. From hand-operated presses to 3d printers that can print and make various objects, even bridges. Yes, bridges! The evolution of printers is, to say the least, a fun and interesting topic.

If you want to know more, go with us on this amazing journey.

Even though that Gutenberg invented the printing press over 600 years ago, the idea behind printing actually began much further away in history. Five thousand years ago to be exact, in Ancient Egypt, the Egyptians used seals to signal that they were owners of particular objects.

But, to print something on paper, you’ll need paper, and the Egyptians are credited for the invention of the earliest known form of paper, called the papyrus. It was made from the papyrus plant that was found, in those ancient times, across the river of the Nile, the longest river in the world, which stretches across most of the Egyptian territory. After that, the evolution of paper took place in Anatolian Greece, Ancient China, and Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.

As papers evolved, so the idea of printing began to take shape. The earliest known form of printing originated in China, almost two thousand years ago. It’s called woodblock printing and it was popular throughout East Asia at that time, and it was actually not the process of printing on paper, rather on the cloth. Even though that printing techniques have been used throughout Asia for quite some time, they were first used in Europe, not before the beginning of the 15 century.

Then, the revolution began with the invention of the printing press in Mainz, Germany, by Johannes Gutenberg. That had a tremendous impact on European society at the time, as the access to various books improved and helped massively in the creation of public libraries.

For almost five centuries the principles of printing remained almost the same, and that should speak more than enough of Gutenberg’s genius.

Still, that doesn’t mean that the printing process in the printing press that Gutenberg invented was easy. Firstly, it can’t be done by just one person, as the task requires two persons, as the device was huge, nothing compared to the printers we see today at home. But, before that, most of the books that you can see before the invention of the printing press were hand-copied by monks, and that was an even more slower and detailed process, not to mention that they weren’t been available to a lot of people.

Gutenberg’s printing press, to put it simply, worked like this: there are inked type blocks, placed in reverse, made from wood or metal and they are used to create words. Then, with the help of a roller, the ink from the type blocks is then being transferred to the paper, hence the process of printing is then complete. Obviously, there are a lot more details and processes on how it worked, which you can see here.

A printing technique that propelled the whole printing process to modern times was surely xerography. Xerography is a dry photocopying technique developed by Chester Carlson. He was so fascinated by the works of Pál Selényi, a Hungarian engineer, that he was so determined to develop xerography.

The first-ever picture printed with this revolutionary technique saw the light of day in 1938, in Seattle, Washington. The electrically charged surfaces help the dry ink to attach to the printer’s drum, therefore this printing technique creates a higher quality picture. That was a huge step forwards in the improvement of printing quality and in bringing printers to homes. In 1959 the massively successful xeroxing copier was introduced, named the Xerox 914 Copier. That copier weighed almost 700 lbs, which is unthinkable by the standards nowadays when you have the copying option in an all-in-one printer that costs under $150. For a long time, the Xerox company didn’t have much competition in the printers and copiers world.

Almost thirty years since the invention of xerograph printing, another breakthrough happened in the evolution of printers. In the 1960s, new printing technology was invented, called laser printing.

It was invented by Gary Starkweather, an American engineer, and worker at the product development department at the previously mentioned Xerox. Laser printers use, as their name suggests, a laser beam that transfers information to the printer’s drum. The static electricity then builds up, attracting the toner, and not the ink (which laser printers don’t need) which then gives you a high-quality picture.

Unlike the laser printers which use a laser, the inkjet printers have a nozzle that transfers the ink to the paper. That concept was developed even earlier than the laser printers, back in the 1950s. However, their development took a long time and inkjet printers hit the market in the 80s. But, in the 1970s, inkjet printers were able to print pictures from computers, which was a tipping point.

Similarly how Steve Jobs introduced iPhone to the world in 2007, as a device that is an iPod with touch controls, a mobile phone, and an internet communicator all-in-one, the all-in-one printers, which appeared in the 1990s, was a device capable of printing, copying, and scanning. Pretty cool, right?

Nowadays, these kinds of printers are everywhere, as it is better to have a printer with multiple capabilities than to get a separate printer and a copier. They are also rather small and there are many affordable options on the market.

The wireless printer was invented almost 30 years ago, in 1993 to be exact, by Andrew Clams. That was a huge invention that enables printers to connect to a wireless network and gets rid of unnecessary cables while also letting you print remotely. Most of today’s printers are wireless and it’s pretty much considered a must that a printer needs to have wireless or Bluetooth connectivity.

Seems crazy, but the 3D printers were actually invented earlier than the wireless printers, in 1984, by Charles Hull. 3D printing technology is nowadays used in most industries to create numerous products.

It’s a huge revolution in the world of technology and it will certainly make an even bigger impact on the world as time goes by. As opposed to printing on paper, the 3D printers give you a three-dimensional object by adding layers on top of each other.

Now that you’ve learned about the whole evolution process of printers, see the 10 fun facts about printers!