Their prices are becoming more affordable and operating costs lower.
Multifunction devices offer increasingly larger scanning resolutions, less margin, larger formats, etc. But still, such home printers are far behind the professional equipment used in professional printers.
Laser printing is an electrostatic digital printing process.
It produces high-quality text and graphics (and moderate-quality photographs) by repeatedly passing a laser beam back and forth over a negatively charged cylinder called a "drum" to define a differentially charged image.1 The drum then selectively collects electrically charged powdered ink (toner), and transfers the image to paper, which is then heated in order to permanently fuse the text, imagery, or both.
As with digital photocopiers, laser printers employ a xerographic printing process. However, laser printing differs from analog photocopiers in that the image is produced by the direct scanning of the medium across the printer's photoreceptor. This enables laser printing to copy images more quickly than most photocopiers.Źródło: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_printingIn 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 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.