Talk:LED printer

I doubt leds burn out from repeated switching, or at least not nearly as fast as incandescent lights. There is no mechanical stress involved from thermal cycling.

If the sources listed had been READ, it would have seen this concern listed in two of the sources Zotel - the Stub Maker 22:28, 30 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

dpi limitation

I wonder about this. If the LEDs can't be packed in at 1200dpi, then maybe they can be packed in at 300dpi and four rows, offset at a 1/4 diameter per row. The hard part would be circuitry to get the four rows pulsing onto the same line of the photoconductor drum. The easy way to do it would be four columns of staggered

_
 _
  _
   _
_
 _
  _
   _

timing signals on the drum. Brewhaha@edmc.net 11:33, 30 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The real "problem" is that, while lasers require moving parts, LED printers require each LED to have extremely consistent characteristics -- thus at some point it got cheaper to bounce a laser around vs. trying to make increasingly-fine arrays of perfectly consistent LEDs. This is the same problem facing OLED displays -- potentially spotty brightness, but it's almost worse in a "line"-type printer where any inconsistency will cause banding down the page. I think Brother was demoing a staggered unit (or some such thing) not too long ago, possibly a line-printer inkjet, but there's not much motivation; today, the laser/optical pack is probably the last thing to die in a printer. If the consistency problem is solved, cheap strips of high-DPI OLED might change the game. You could even make an LCD printer with an even backlight.

How to deal with so many explanations of the same thing?

The xerography, the photocopying article, and the laser printer article all attempt to describe the same processes three different ways. It would be nice if the technical details could be focused somehow into a single article that all the others refer to, rather than duplicating the same data across so many locations, such as is being done with the LED printer article.

I'm not really sure how this should be done. Generally I think the xerography artcle should be the master discussion of the technical processes, with the laser printer article just referring to the specific details of the exposure step, as is currently being done with the LED printer article. I have no idea how to deal with the photocopying article since it seems to be an almost unnecessary duplication of the xerography article.

As a somewhat new editor on here, I don't really be the one to be making such large changes, moving the guts of the laser printer technical discussion to the xerography article. But something should be done..

(This talk article has been copied into the talk for xerography, photocopying, laser printer, and LED printer. If you want to comment I suggest putting your response in the talk for xerography.)

DMahalko 00:19, 19 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The stuff from about.com about leds switching on/off reducing their lifespan is complete rubbish. All LED displays beyond, say, 10 LEDs, are multiplexed. Multiplexing can reduce lifetime because while a LED is only on for a short period of time, it needs to appear as bright as though it was on all the time. This is not the case in LED printers. Therefore, it shouldn't need to be overdriven, and its lifetime will be longer (because it simply isn't on all the time).