Printer that produces very high quality text and graphics using a laser beam. The beam draws the characters as tiny dots - normally 300 or 600 dots per inch - on to a special drum. The drum then attracts a fine black powder (called toner) to these dots which is transferred to a sheet of paper. The final stage is to heat the toner which melts it on to the paper forming a permanent image. Laser printers are more expensive than almost any other type of printer, but are generally faster and excellent quality. Other types of printer include inkjet and dot-matrix. (See also Inkjet and Dot-matrix.)
