Glossary Of Printer Terms (Part 1 of 2):

ALL-IN-ONE Printer – These are Multi Function (MFC)/All-In-One printers which means they  can perform a variety of task including printing, scanning, copying and faxing, so that we don’t have to purchase individuals pieces of equipment.

Borderless Printing - Borderless printing allows a printer to output photos with no borders. This is extremely helpful for edge-to-edge printing.

Dot Matrix Printer - A dot matrix printer works by striking an ink ribbon to print tiny and closely spaced dots onto paper to form certain characters and simple images and is excellent for invoices, address labels and carbon copy invoices.

DPI - Dots per inch, used to indicate printing resolutions that are measured both horizontally and vertically. For example, a resolution of 4800 x 1200 dpi means 4800 dots across and 1200 dots down so that there are 5,760,000 dots per square inch in total.

Duplex Printing - A technology allowing printing on both sides of the paper (sometimes referred to as two-sided printing).

Impact Printing - Impact printing creates images and text by striking the print media/paper. Dot matrix printers adopt impact printing technology.

Inkjet Printer - Inkjet printers spray extremely tiny and precise ink droplets to create characters and graphics. Based on color mixing principles, inkjet printers utilize several ink cartridges containing different colors to produce vivid color images, which is why inkjet printers are often applied in picture-intensive printing.

Laser Printer - A laser printer is also non-impact and uses laser to adhere solid toner (typically black powder) instead of spraying liquid ink onto paper to create images. In a laser printer, the drum (looks like a cylinder), laser unit, toner cartridge and fuser are important components for printing.

LPT/ Parallel Port - LPT, also known as Parallel Port, is a type of archived port used in the past by printers; today almost all printers use USB connections.


Part 2 of this Blog will be posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2012.

CHANGE YOUR SCREEN DISPLAY SETTINGS

CHANGE YOUR screen display settings

You can access your Display settings by right-clicking anywhere on the Desktop and then

• In Windows XP choose Properties
• In Windows Vista & Windows 7 choose Personalize

Both of these bring you to the Display section of the Control Panel (so you can also get to the same spot by going to your Start Menu, Control Panel & Appearance/Display)

When you access the Properties or Personalize command:

• In Windows XP you will open the Display Properties Dialog Box – there are five tab choices: Themes, Desktop, Screen Saver, Appearance and Settings.
• In Windows Visa & Windows 7 a Page of Lists appear and you’ll have the ability to make changes in all these same categories – you will just have many more options…

Basically, this is what each segment allows you to do… 

Themes

This allows you to choose a theme which will apply to all your Windows screen,the icons, sounds and colors – such as jungle, underwater & many more.

Desktop

This will allow you to choose different desktop background images, from samples which are inlcuded or you can use the BROWSE button to find a photo you have saved in you’re My Picture Folder…  Remember – if you find a photo in an email or on the internet that you want for your background, when your cursor is on the image, right click on the image and choose Set as Desktop Background. In Windows 7 there is a grat new feature which allows yiu to have the desktop change using  photos from Windows or your own photos-similar to what happens in the Screen Saver segment

Screen Saver:

Screen Savers are the “motion” choices we use when our computer is idle – many different ones are built in, or you can use the photos in you’re my Picture Folder or when you are on vacation you can purchase “screen savers” to remind you of your trip… This is also where we can change our Power settings for the monitor, noting how long it should stay on when we leave our computer alone.. Remember you can change how quickly you want the screen saver to go on and other choices…

Appearance:

This choice allows us to change the style and colors and size of fonts for our Windows and buttons.  Just click on the drop-down arrow buttons to choose different settings; the font size option is great if text is too small – just change it to large fonts or extra large fonts..  The advanced tab allows us to change size & colors for all our screen items including borders, icons and the menus.

Settings:

This choice allows us to change screen resolution and color quality – remember the resolution determines the number of pixels used to make up the display. The higher the setting, the more detailed your display and the higher resolution gives you a larger screen area to work with, but if you find text and icons are now too small you may need to increase font size and use larger icons to compensate.

You can only go up to the highest resolution that your monitor can support. 

Experiment to find a resolution you are comfortable with – many opt for the highest setting.

When you set a high resolution, increasing the DPI (dots per inch) setting – it makes all screen items including text appear larger.

Photo Scanning Tips

Most of us have old family photos that we would like to share - either in a book or movie maker project, or in online photo albums or facebook - or just to have additional copies made.. So scanning allows us to "convert" those photo to digital and save them on our computers.. Here are a few tips when you are scanning photos and documents...

1) Be sure to remove any dirt, lint, or smudges from what you are scanning with a soft brush or lint-free photowipe. I don’t recommend “Canned air” especially for older photos that could be damaged…

2) Make sure your scanner glass is clean of all lint, fingerprints, smudges and particles-use a camera lens wipe, or if you use a glass cleaner, never spray it on the glass surface; always spray it on a lint free cloth and then wipe the glass.

3) Have clean hands, so you don’t leave skin oil on your photos or scanner glass. Many professionals wear white cotton gloves (available from photo stores and hardware stores) when they handle photos...

4) Choose the type of scan-it’s always best to scan in color, even all those old black and whites, so you have more manipulation options when you use your photo editing software, such as Picasa, Photoshop etc.

5) For the best scan resolution (quality), rule of thumb is a minimum of 300dpi (Dots Per Inch) for decent quality for enhancement and restoration techniques and 600dpi or greater if you plan to store these on CD or DVD.

6) Only scan “1” photo or document at a time. If you put multiple photos – you will have 1 scanned item with multiple photos or documents in it…

7) Once you scan your item, before you "save it" be sure the “sizing handles” are around just the actual photo and not the entire scan plate. And don’t do cropping here – save the actual photo, and then you can crop and enhance with your photo editing software.

8) Saving what you've scanned - Some scanners allow you to choose the folder where you want to name and save the scanned photo – others will automatically save it in the “My Scan Folder” and name it with a numbering sequence (the folder will have the date you did the scanning, and each scanned item will have sequential numbers, ie Scan 0001, Scan 0002, Scan 0003 – and the folder name might be: 2011-3.7 (9) – the number in parenthesis indicates the number of scans you did that day.

9) Once you are done scanning – if your scanned items are in the “My Scan” Folder, be sure to “rename” your scanned items instead of leaving them with the scan numbers – otherwise if you combine several days of scanning into one folder – multiple items would then have the same numbers which is unacceptable and you could lose photos…

It's wonderful to scan as many of our old photos and documents as possible, so that they are identified and in a format for "the future" versus sitting in boxes or closet drawers that may then be someday thrown away because no one knows who or what they are ...

Yes, it's time consuming, but so worth the effort...Enjoy