line printer

An impact printer that prints one line at a time. The two surviving line printer technologies are band printers and line matrix printers. Line printers are still widely used in datacenters and in industrial environments and can print multipart forms at a very rapid rate. For example, a 1,000 lpm line printer printing on three-part forms is the equivalent of a 50 ppm laser printer. See band printer, line matrix printer and printer.

Line Printer

The line printer is typically enclosed in a cabinet that completely seals the unit from the outside world. This used to be essential when line printers were extremely noisy. Today's line printers are even quieter than laser printers.

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(printer)

line printer - A printer that prints one entire line at a time. Print quality is low compared with a laser printer. Line printers typically use sprocket feed and wide fanfold paper. Line printer speed is usually measured in lines per minute (lpm). 1200 lpm is a good rate for a line printer like a 3205 m5. 66 lines per page is typical, giving 18 pages per minute (ppm). This assumes all upper case, if a mixed case print train is used, throughput is halved. By comparison, a fast laser printer can output 100+ ppm