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By now most people are thoroughly familiar with the iconic inkjet printer offered by brands like Hewlett Packard and Xerox, but did you know that there are actually many different kinds of printers in use ranging from glorified typewriters to machines that use lasers or thermal paper to work? Howstuffworks.com has a number of articles about the behind-the-scenes workings of printers and other office technology, including a great breakdown of the shockingly wide variety of printers commonly available on the market. Office technology has come a long way from the good old days of noisy dot matrix printers that took several minutes to print!

In general printers can be broken down into two general types: impact printers, which need to actually touch the paper to transfer the ink, and non-impact printers that do not. Most people reading this article will have had some experience with both types of printers at one point or another–impact printers tend to be the older, classic models like the dot matrix, and non-impact encompasses the modern inkjet printers.

However, that is only the more dull and formal information in the articles, the really interesting part is when you start looking at some of the newer and more experimental technology. Anyone who has ever worked in an office environment is at least passingly familiar with the futuristic laser printers that use a combination of space age dust ink called toner and a combination of static electricity and lasers to bond the ink to paper. However, did you know that there are also printers that actually use color changing paper instead of ink cartridges? Thermal autochrome printers actually have the colors in the paper themselves in three layers: cyan, magenta and yellow. Each of these layers is activated by applying a certain amount of heat, so that one temperature will activate yellow while another will make cyan appear. How’s that for unusual ways to print out your family photos?