Output Device : Plotters

Plotters are used to produce precise and good quality graphics and drawings. they use an ink pen or inkjet, a single coloured or multicoloured pens. The pens are driven by a motor. Pen plotters are slow. Drawings can be prepared on paper vellum or mylar (polyester film). colour transparencies can also be prepared with the help of pen plotters. there are different types of pen plotters:

1. Drum plotters

A drum plotter contains a long cylinder and a pen cartridge. The drum rotates under the control of plotting instructions sent by the computer either in clockwise or anti-clockwise direction. the pen is mounted horizontally on the carriage and moves horizontally under the computer's control with the carriage left to right and right to left on the paper to produce a drawing. Pens with inks of different colours can be mounted on the carriage and multicoloured drawings can be produced.

2. Micro-grip Plotter:

This type of plotter do not use a drum. the paper or any other medium is held on both sides at the edges by pinch wheels which ensure back and forth movement of the paper.

3. Flatbed Plotter:

A flatbed plotter consists of a horizontal flat surface on which paper or any other medium is fixed. the pen is mounted on a carriage which can move along the horizontal and vertical axis.

4. Inkjet-Plotter:

These plotters are capable of producing large multicoloured drawings while closing inkjets in place of ink pens. the paper is placed on a drum and inkjets with different coloured inks are mounted on a carriage.

Output Device : Printers

A printer is a peripheral which produces a text and/or graphics of documents stored in electronic form, usually on physical print media such as paper or transparencies. Many printers are primarily used as local peripherals, and are attached by a printer cable or, in most newer printers, a USB cable to a computer which serves as a document source.

Some printers, commonly known as network printers, have built-in network interfaces, typically wireless and/or Ethernet based, and can serve as a hard copy device for any user on the network. Individual printers are often designed to support both local and network connected users at the same time.

In addition, a few modern printers can directly interface to electronic media such as memory cards, or to image capture devices such as digital cameras, scanners; some printers are combined with a scanners and/or fax machines in a single unit, and can function as photocopiers. Printers that include non-printing features are sometimes called multifunction printers (MFP), multi-function devices (MFD), or all-in-one (AIO) printers. Most MFPs include printing, scanning, and copying among their many features.

Impact Printers:

These printers use the electromechanical mechanism, that is pressing a typeface against an inked ribbon, Which marks it on a paper and prints the characters. Egs: DMP (Dot Matrix Printer), Drum and Daisy-Wheel printer. Impact printers can further be divided into two types:

   a) Line Printers which print one line at a time eg. drum and chain printers whereas

   b) Character printers print one character at a time.

Drum Printer: It has a rapidly rotating cylindrical drum on which characters are embossed in a standard 132-column printer. There are 132 bands containing every possible character.

There are 132 hammers lifting the paper-and -ribbon drums. Logic circulating in the printer makes a hammer(which is electromagnetically operated) strike against the drum as the required character to be printed passes through. Likewise, the sequence continues and a line is printed on the paper.

Chain Printers: The mechanism of printing is slightly different as in a drum printer. The drum rotates vertically in circular motion and there is a set of characters for every hammer. In a chain printer, the chain is the unit on which letters are embossed and it moves horizontally in a circular motion against the hammers. The mechanism of hammers striking against the chain is almost similar. A chain consists of five or six sets of characters. whenever a character which is required to be printed passes in front of the hammer position, the hammer strikes and the character impression gets printed on the paper. the paper and ribbon both move in between the chain and hammer.

Character Printers:

They print a character at a time. Examples are the dot matrix printer and the Daisy Wheel printer.

Dot-Matrix Printer:

Unlike the drum and chain printer which have letters embossed with the hammer striking against it, dot-matrix printers generally have seven or nine impact pins. these pins fire or strike under the control of a printer logic through an electromagnetic motion. the complete unit comprises of impact pins and coils - called the printer head.

The paper on which the printing is done moves up and down depending upon the model of the printer. The printer head moves left to right or vice-versa, permitting a 5x7 - matrix character for a 7-pin head and a 7x9 matrix character for a 9-pin head. The speed of the dot matrix printers is noted in CPS (characters per second). These printers come in widths of 80 columns and 132 columns.

Daisy-wheel Printers:

This is a character with a daisy wheel on which characters are embossed. There is a hammer against the wheel. the paper movement is similar to the dot-matrix printer. The presence of one hammer ensures that one character is printed at a time in Daisy-Wheel printer.

Non-Impact Printers

These printers do not use an electro-mechanical printing head to strike against ribbon and paper. They use thermal, chemical, electrostatic, laser beam or inkjet technology for printing. Examples are thermal, inkjet and laser printers. these printers are faster than the impact printers.

Inkjet Printers:

They print characters by spraying small drops of ink onto paper. A special ink with high iron content is used. the droplets of ink are charged electrically after being lead onto a nozzle. The droplets are then guided to thin proper positions on paper by electrically-charged deflection plates. These are high-quality printers and are therefore better than impact printers.

Laser Printers

Laser printers use light beams to form images on paper using a toner ink as a medium. A beam of light strikes the exposed parts of the drum surface. The light beam gets electrically charged and exposed areas attract the toner ink particles. The toner particles are then deposited on and permanently fixed to the paper using heat or pressure. Laser printers are quiet workers. they produce very high-quality output both textually and graphically.

Thermal Printers

These printers use heat to make a mark on heat-sensitive paper. the print head contains needles which are pressed against the paper. On applying heat to the selected pins, the paper changes colour to form a pattern of dots.

Output Devices : VDU (Visual Display Unit)

The job of the output device is to bring the result of computation to the outside world. The output devices accept data in binary form from the computer, converts the coded data into human readable form, and then the converted result is displayed as output.

All computers are connected to a television like screen, called the monitor. Monitor includes the graphic card or the video adapter, which is an expansion card which sends electric signals to the monitor. The monitor is connected by a cable to the video card. A device driver uses the operating system to control the video card, to make it send the right signals to the monitor.

Cathode Ray Tube (CRT)

The first computer monitors used Cathode ray tubes (CRTs), which was the dominant technology until they were replaced by LCD monitors in the 21st Century.

The first computer monitors used cathode ray tubes (CRT). Until the early 1980s, they were known as video display terminals and were physically attached to the computer and keyboard. The monitors were monochrome, flickered and the image quality was poor. In 1981, IBM invented the Color Graphics Adapter, which could display four colors with a resolution of 320 by 200 pixels. They introduced the Enhanced Graphics Adapter in 1984, which was capable of producing 16 colors and had a resolution of 640 by 350.

CRT remained the standard for computer monitors through the 1990s. CRT technology remained dominant in the PC monitor market into the new millennium partly because it was cheaper to produce and offered viewing angles close to 180 degrees.

Liquid Crystal diaplay (LCD) Screens :

LCD screens are flat and soft. An example is the TFT screen. It contains no cathode ray tube. It produces a sharp and high resolution image.

There are multiple technologies that have been used to implement Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs). Throughout the 1990s the primary use of LCD technology as computer monitors was in laptops where the lower power consumption, lighter weight, and smaller physical size of LCDs justified the higher price verses a CRT. Commonly, the same laptop would be offered with an assortment of display options at increasing price points (active or passive monochrome, passive color, active matrix color (TFT). As volume and manufacturing capability have improved the monochrome and passive color technologies were dropped from most product lines.

TFT is a variant of liquid crystal display (LCD) which is now the dominant technology used for computer monitors.

Input / Output with Files

C++ has support both for input and output with files through the following classes:

                ofstream: File class for writing operations (derived from ostream)

                ifstream: File class for reading operations (derived from istream)

                fstream: File class for both reading and writing operations (derived from iostream)

Open a file

The first operation generally done on an object of one of these classes is to associate it to a real file, that is to say, to open a file. The open file is represented within the program by a stream object (an instantiation of one of these classes) and any input or output performed on this stream object will be applied to the physical file. LEARN MORE>>