A laser printer is a common type of printer which is most often seen in offices. A laser printer produces a high quality finish and can print many pages quickly. Colour printers normally use xerographic printing processes, just like a photocopier does.

The page to be printed is stored in the laser printer’s memory. An electrostatic charge is applied onto the photoconductor unit in the laser printer. A laser is then aimed at the photoreceptor in the form of the image that needs to be printed. Where the light falls, the charge is reversed on the photoconductor unit. This creates an electrostatic image on the photoreceptor surface.

A colour printer is an electronic device which normally attaches to a computer in order to print out data stored on the computer in electronic formats. Popular things that get printed on a printer are text documents, photos and webpages.

A colour printer, like the name suggests, prints in colour and can produce images of multiple colours.

A photo printer is a special kind of colour printer which mimics the colour rang and resolution of a normal photograph. Many of these can read directly from a memory card therefore do not need to be directly plugged into a printer. Special photographic paper can be bought for these machines so that the finished printed product is almost unidenitfiable to the untrained eye to a normal photograph.

A printer is an electronic device which produce documents, usually on paper, from something stored in electronic format on the computer. Many printers are connected directly to the computer itself, although some printers are connected into networks to allow more than one computer to print to them at a time.

In addition to this, many computers can also now interface with electronic media such as memmory sticks or flash memory cards and print direct from these.

Sometimes, printers are combined with photocopiers and scanners. These sorts of printers are known as ‘all-in-one’ printers.

Polycom is a manufacturer who make tele-conferencing and video-conferencing equipment.

The company was founded by Brian Hinman and Jeff Rodman in December 1990. Until 1992, Polycom was an R&D firm before starting to sell voice communications product.

According to recent surveys, Polycome have about 42% market share for video and 75% for voice products.

Polycom have offices around the world, in the US, Canada, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Carribean and Latin America as well as partners in varying places through the world.

A plasma TV uses plasma display panel (PDP) technology. Plasma TVs have a flat panel display and are normally over 32″ in size. Plasma screens have gas in the screen which is electrically turned into plasma which in turn excites phosphors to emit light.

Plasma TVs are not a new invention - they were in fact invented in 1964. Plasma TV displays are normally very bright and can be produced in very large sizes - up to over a metre across the diagonal. The power consumption of a plasma TV will vary from TV to TV and will depend on what is watched on it. Bright scenes such as a football match will need significantly more power than a dark scene. Plasma TVS also have a wider viewing angle than most other forms of TV screen.

PDA stands for Personal Digital Assistant. PDAs are small, handheld computers that are sometimes also known as pocket computers or palmtop computers.

PDAs have many uses and many have the same features as desktop PCs such as games, clock, spreadsheets, emails, word processing etc. Many PDAs have colour screens and audio capabilities too. Some PDAs can even connect to the internet via Wi-fi. However, PDAs cannot replace a desktop or laptop PC because they tend to be more expensive and they don’t have the same processing capabilites $ for $.

Popular brands of PDAs include:
Psion
Blackberry
Dell Axim
Fujitsu Siemens
hp
Palm Pilot
Sony Clie

An oven is a kitchen appliance which can be used for baking, roasting or drying. Usually, ovens are used in cooking or pottery. Some ovens use gas for heat whereas others will use electricity as their power source. Ovens in pottery are more often known as kilns. If the oven is large and used in a commercial or industrial manner, the over will be known as a furnace.