Shortly about solid ink printers
Solid ink printers, also known as phase-change printers, are a type of thermal transfer printer. They use solid sticks of CMYK-coloured ink, similar in consistency to candle wax, which are melted and fed into a piezo crystal operated print-head. The printhead sprays the ink on a rotating, oil coated drum. The paper then passes over the print drum, at which time the image is immediately transferred, or transfixed, to the page. Solid ink printers are most commonly used as colour office printers, and are excellent at printing on transparencies and other non-porous media. Solid ink printers can produce excellent results. Acquisition and operating costs are similar to laser printers. Drawbacks of the technology include high energy consumption and long warm-up times from a cold state. Also, some users complain that the resulting prints are difficult to write on, as the wax tends to repel inks from pens, and are difficult to feed through automatic document feeders, but these traits have been significantly reduced in later models. In addition, this type of printer is only available from one manufacturer, Xerox, manufactured as part of their Xerox Phaser office printer line. Previously, solid ink printers were manufactured by Tektronix, but Tek sold the printing business to Xerox in 2001.
Źródło: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_(computing)
Computer printer in Wikipedia page
In computing, a printer is a peripheral device which makes a persistent human-readable representation of graphics or text on paper. The first computer printer designed was a mechanically driven apparatus by Charles Babbage for his difference engine in the 19th century; however, his mechanical printer design was not built until 2000. The first electronic printer was the EP-101, invented by Japanese company Epson and released in 1968. The first commercial printers generally used mechanisms from electric typewriters and Teletype machines. The demand for higher speed led to the development of new systems specifically for computer use. In the 1980s were daisy wheel systems similar to typewriters, line printers that produced similar output but at much higher speed, and dot matrix systems that could mix text and graphics but produced relatively low-quality output. The plotter was used for those requiring high quality line art like blueprints.
Źródło: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_(computing)
Printing is not one thing
Printing is not only printing leaflets, business cards or large banners - it also prints other, necessary materials such as: stickers, self-adhesive letters or labels. In principle, everything that comes out of the printing house can be included in the category of printing.
There are plants specializing in the production of only a specific group of printed materials: eg leaflets, or only large-format printing. However, this results from a simple thing: for every type of printing you need to have the right machine, and these take up space and cost a lot. That is why printing plants limit the amount of services provided.