Input and Output

Ergonomic Keyboard

Ergonomic Keyboard

Ergonomic keyboards are designed to reduce muscle strain from repetitive muscle movements from interacting with the computer, such as repeatedly clicking and typing for prolonged periods of time. Ergonomic keyboards are made in a way to lower the risk of injuring oneself from the strains of these repetitive actions that may be required from one's job.

Ink-jet Printer

Ink-jet Printer

Ink-jet printers work on the basis of spraying tiny droplets of ink on paper. The ink is ionized, and the direction of spray is directed by magnetized plates. The tiny dots of colour are extremely small and the distance between each dot is so minimal that it usually goes unnoticed by the human eye. The size of the dots vary from 50 to 60 microns, which is smaller than even the diameter of the human hair, which is 70 microns.

Laser Printer

Inside a Laser Printer

Laser Printer

Static electricity is the primary principle behind the workings of a laser printer, and it is used as a "temporary glue". A revolving drum is often used as the core component, and it is highly photoconductive. A tiny laser beam is shot at the paper as the drum revolves, producing an electrostatic image. Then, the drum is coated by black powder called toner. This clings to negatively charged areas of the drum in the same image as the one drawn on the paper, and the paper is then rolled around the paper before being detached to absorb the image onto it, also using positively and negatively charged ions to do so.

Magnetic-ink Character Recognition (MICR)

MICR fonts

MICR-reading machine

MICR is a technique applied to read specially printed in magnetic-ink characters and then quickly and effectively inputting them into a computer. It is often used in banking because MICR can be read by machines far faster and far more accurate than any human and system can achieve, so they are usually used to read characters and codes on cheques.

Optical-character Recognition (OCR)

OCR Programme

Before using the OCR, the material has to be scanned first with an optical scanner to read in the page as a bitmap. Then, OCR software is used to tell between images and text and the letters used by light and dark areas. OCR can be said as the "guessing" of letters as many techniques and even algorithms are applied to search for matches of image scanned to letters known, hence it is sometimes inaccurate.

Optical-mark Recognition (OMR)

OMR sheet

To extract data from marked fields such as fill-in fields and printed forms. Predefined positions and records where marks are made on the forms are identified by the OMR, and since it does not require character recognition ability it is able to process forms and surveys with fill-in fields accurately at very fast rates.