Important Difference Between Laser and Line Printers

by Elizabeth Mott

Laser and line printers serve opposite ends of the output spectrum. If your business rarely prints multipart forms, you probably don't need a line printer. On the other hand, if all your output consists of paperwork that you distribute among multiple departments, a laser printer is not the ideal tool. Other than putting information on paper, these two types of hardware have almost nothing in common except the word "printer."

Impact Printer

Line printers strike the paper with hammers as each correct letter, number or punctuation formed into a continuous matrix of characters on a chain, band or rotating cylinder reaches the proper position across the width of a sheet of paper. Instead of fully formed characters, the line matrix printer -- a later variation on this impact technology -- uses a bidirectional shuttle with dot hammers that contact the paper. Both band and line matrix printers can provide high-speed output of more than 60 pages per minute.

Page Printer

Laser printers image a full sheet at a time, applying a powdered mixture onto a drum in a pattern that represents the content of a page. The drum holds a positive charge that a laser reverses where the mixture will adhere just long enough to transfer onto a negatively charged piece of paper. A heat source called a fuser bonds the image in place. Some color printers apply each of four colors -- cyan, magenta, yellow and black -- separately; others combine the colors and apply them in one pass.


Like all impact printers, line printers use a single-color ribbon as their image source, producing output that can range close to 200 dots per inch. True line printers create output wholly comprised of letters, numbers and punctuation because their type chains, bands or cylinders only include complete characters. Line matrix printers can create monochrome graphics. The ribbon produces the first copy in a multipart form, with the copies behind it created by the impact on encapsulated ink or carbons.


Laser printers use a mixture of plastic and pigment to produce monochrome or full-color output at resolutions up to and beyond 1,200 dots per inch, rivaling a printing press for clarity and definition. Their ability to reproduce line-screened output enables them to create a range of colors by combining various sizes of dots in their primary toner colors. The tenacity of the heat-set bond between toner and paper makes laser output impervious to water, light and even friction. Because laser output involves no impact, laser devices create copies only by printing multiple iterations of the same page of a document.

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