The PC Sitting on your desk isn’t that much different from the one you have at home, despite what the PC vendors might want you to think. But there’s a good chance that the components of the personal printer in your office from one vendor bear little resemblance to the makeup of your home printer from another vendor.
Printers have remained defiantly proprietary in a world where hardware designers increasingly favor standard components. But many of the technology advances of the last several years can be found in the components of the printer: the ink, the printhead, and even the paper on which the output is printed.
And unlike the PC business, which makes use of common suppliers and standard technologies, each vendor has a slightly different way of getting the image or document from the screen onto paper. PCs, handhelds, and low-end servers are now mostly sold on price and features, while printer companies still try to convince customers that their technology is better than the other companies