O u t p u t   D e v i c e s  

Monitor

Essentially two types:

• cathode ray tube (CRT)
• liquid crystal display (LCD) (flat, need less power, mostly used in notebooks)

Resolution: Number of pixels to be seen, like 800*600, or 1,024*768.

Color depth: The number of colors that can be seen. Remember, colors are also encoded by bits or bytes. Using 24 bits, you can create about 16 million colors (true color). High color uses only 16 bits (about 65,000 colors). Black and white uses only 1 bit, grayscale uses few bits (4-8).

Refresh rate in Hertz (Hz): times per second the screen is updated.

Printer

Essentially three types at the moment:

• dot-matrix printer (old days, 9 or 24 needles)
• inkjet printer, mostly bubble or piezoelectric
• laser printer

laser printer are mainly black and white. color printer use "black", "red", "blue" and "yellow" to create all colors.

Printer don't work on a pixel basis, rather using coordinates

Communication from the computer

Uses a parallel port cable, allowing to send 8 bytes at the same time. Or (more recently) again USB.