About solid ink printers
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. The paper then passes over the print drum, at which time the image is immediately transferred, or transfixed, to the page. Solid ink printers are most commonly used as colour office printers, and are excellent at printing on transparencies and other non-porous media. Solid ink printers can produce excellent results. Acquisition and operating costs are similar to laser printers. Drawbacks of the technology include high energy consumption and long warm-up times from a cold state. Also, some users complain that the resulting prints are difficult to write on, as the wax tends to repel inks from pens, and are difficult to feed through automatic document feeders, but these traits have been significantly reduced in later models. In addition, this type of printer is only available from one manufacturer, Xerox, manufactured as part of their Xerox Phaser office printer line. Previously, solid ink printers were manufactured by Tektronix, but Tek sold the printing business to Xerox in 2001.
Źródło: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_(computing)
Printing is not one thing
Printing is not only printing leaflets, business cards or large banners - it also prints other, necessary materials such as: stickers, self-adhesive letters or labels. In principle, everything that comes out of the printing house can be included in the category of printing.
There are plants specializing in the production of only a specific group of printed materials: eg leaflets, or only large-format printing. However, this results from a simple thing: for every type of printing you need to have the right machine, and these take up space and cost a lot. That is why printing plants limit the amount of services provided.
Most important is ... paper
Paper in printing and printing is probably the most important thing next to paints. Without it, printing would not be possible. Paper as a material has been known since 105, n. E., That is for a very long time. However, it was not until the twentieth century that more and more types of paper for various applications were invented.
And now we have paper chalked, white, slippery, coated with plastics, etc. All this to achieve different results of advertising and journalistic printing. The end result of the printed item depends on the choice of paper, its durability and durability.