BY PRADYUMNA S A

Input / Output Units

Optical Mark Reading or Recognition(OMR) Pre-printed forms with boxes. The data is read by the document reader and transcribes into electrical pulses and send to computer. Usage: When volume of data is large Time sheets, Objective type answers Advantages: Minimizes data entry Disadvantages: accurate alignment of printing forms required. Good quality paper required Form cannot be redesigned since its expensive

By Trupti V.G, Asst. Prof, PESIT

OMR
Many traditional OMR devices work with a dedicated scanner device that shines a beam of light onto the form paper. The contrasting reflectivity at predetermined positions on a page is then used to detect the marked areas because they reflect less light than the blank areas of the paper. Now that there are OMR softwares available.
Udai OMR Moodle also has an extension, Quiz OMR, which provides online support for offline quizzes conducted on OMR sheets. TCExam supports offline testing conducted on OMR sheets.

Optical character Recognition(OCR)

OCR is the mechanical or electronic conversion of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. Optical scanner: Device to read an image convert it to set of 0s and 1s and store in computer memory. Usage: Text mining. Pattern recognition OCR software recognizes each character- targets type written text The text to be printed is converted to ASCII representation of character is stored. 2500 characters can be stored using 2500 bytes Types: OCR, OWR, ICR- intelligent character recognition, IWR.

OCR
Conversion: The image is converted to bit map representation. Based on the intersection of horizontal and vertical lines the representation is done. 0- if intersects, 1- if not. This bit map representation of image is processed. Each bit of image is a pixel(Picture Element)

Scanners
Two types: Hand held scanner Flat bed scanners Hand held scanners: Set of LEDs Placed over the material to be scanned and dragged from top to bottom. The LEDs are reflected by white areas and are not reflected by black areas. The material(in image form) is converted and stored as bit map. Bit map image is 400 bits/ inch Usage: In application where accuracy is not needed

Scanners
Flat bed scanners: consist of box with glass plate on top which has a cover. The document to be scanned is placed over the glass plate Light beam situated below the glass plate is moved from left to right horizontally . Scans one line at a time. The contents of pages is stored in bit map of 400 dots/ inch Each dot is one bit. 8 bits are used to represent 256 shades. For color images 24 bits for each dot is used which provides 224 = 4 million colors. They can be connected to computer and bits may be stored.

Scanners
The scanned image may contain 1.8Mbytes/page Software for compressing the data based on the amount of storage. Compression algorithms used for amount of compression required and processing time. DEFLATE uses GIF image format Two popular formats for compression are:
Gif (Graphics Interchange Format) JPEG (Joint Picture Expert Group)

Decompression while printing

Output units
Three principal devices: Printer Video terminal Computer output microfilm Printing and microfilming are hard copy units. Hard copy: text or image on paper Soft copy devices: output devices that store data as bit strings, read and interpreted by computer. Ex: CD ROM, USB sticks Pen drives, External Hard disks

Printers
Two types of printers line printers serial character printers

Line printers: Prints a complete line Speed: 200 lines to 2000 lines per minute
75 characters to 300 characters on a 15 inch line

Two types of line printers

Drum printers Chain printers

Drum printers
Consist of cylindrical drum On the surface of it fixed font character sets are engraved. It has wheels that are joined with drum. When the wheels spin at high speed the paper and ink ribbon is moved to the print position.

Chain printers
Character sets are embossed. Not flexible to change fonts. Best known chain printers IBM 1403 They are superseded by line matrix printers

Working of printers
It consist of print head with pins, and a ribbon. The ribbon is placed between the print head and the paper. Pins are moved electromechanically to strike a ribbon. So a character is printed when one pin strikes the ribbon. If a line of characters are to be printed then its stored in the memory and the pins are activated to print a line.

Line matrix printers

Comb of hammers are used to print a portion of pixel of lines. Shifts the comb back and forth while a pixel of lines are printed. During printing character and line spacing are adjustable depending on font type. Features: any font, pictures, barcodes, multiple copies, ribbons can be reused Speed: 200 to 2000 lines/ minute depending on font and language. Usage: Used when large volumes of data are to be printed. It builds up a line of text by printing lines of dots.

Serial printers
Prints one character at a time with printing head moving across a line. Slow (30 to 300 characters per second) Similar to typewriters. Example: dot matrix printer. Dot matrix printer: Printing head consist of array of 24 pins arranged vertically. Head is moved horizontally to print characters. It can print pictures Multicolor printing is possible--- multi colored ribbons.

Serial printers
Characters to be printed are sent one character at a time from memory to printer. Character code is decoded and activates pins in the print head. Pins are moved forward to form a character and they hit the carbon ribbon in front of paper. They are bidirectional. Sample output of serial dot matrix printer

continued
Line printers and dot matrix printers are called impact printers Since a hammer strikes the carbon coated ribbon to print. Advantages:
Multiple copies

Disadvantages:
Noisy compared to inkjet and laser printers.

Application:
Govt offices, business offices.

Inkjet printers
Print head and nozzles. Each holes are heated by Integrated Circuit Resistor The ink near the resistor vaporizes, ejects through the nozzle and prints a dot on the paper. High resolution inkjet printer has 50 nozzles within the height of 0.276 inch It can print 300 dots per inch Speed: 120 cps Advantages: Better appearance of characters than dot matrix printers.(quality printing) Enough memory. Allows color printing High speed, quieter in operation Disadvantage: cost of ink cartridge is high so expensive

Laser printer
The mechanical motion in the printers is relatively slow. This led to development of laser printers Digital printing process that provides high quality printing. Laser printer passes a laser beam over a charged drum (photoconductive drum) The drum then selectively collects charged toner(powdered ink) and transfers the image to paper, which is then heated to permanently fix the image. They are know as non-impact printers. Speed: 10000 lines per minute(depends on model) Expensive, excellent printing quality

Plotters
The plotter is a computer printer for printing vector graphics.(drawings and graphs). Plotters differ from printers in that plotters use continuous lines to create images while printers use a collection of dots. Two types of plotters: Drum plotters Flat bed plotters

Drum plotters
The paper is mounted on the rotating drum. A pen which can move perpendicular to the direction of drum rotation Drum rotation can be either clockwise or anticlockwise under the control instructions of the computer. The movement of pen and drum are controlled by graph plotting program.

Flat bed plotters

Horizontal plotting surface on which the paper is fixed. Pen mounted on carriage that moves in x and y direction. Applications: engineering drawings, plan of buildings, machine parts.

 Some of the plotting softwares Grace: Is a 2D graph plotting tool, for Unix-like operating systems. HippoDraw is a powerful object oriented statistical data analysis package Venn diagram plotters :This program can draw correctly proportioned and positioned Venn diagrams,