Input & Output



An ergonomic keyboard is one designed to make typing more comfortable by conforming more closely to the shape of human hands, making the keys closer to the finger tips than a traditional keyboard. See how an ergonomic keyboard can help the health of human hands in the long run with information from a certified computer technician in this free video on computers.



In computing, a technique that enables special characters printed in magnetic ink to be read and input rapidly to a computer. MICR is used extensively in banking because magnetic-ink characters can be machine-read with much greater accuracy than human reading or other optical character recognition (OCR) systems, and are therefore ideal for marking and identifying the account and sort code numbers on cheques.

A type of printer that works by spraying ionized ink at a sheet of paper. Magnetized plates in the ink's path direct the ink onto the paper in the desired shapes. Ink-jet printers are capable of producing high quality print approaching that produced by laser printers. A typical ink-jet printer provides a resolution of 300 dots per inch, although some newer models offer higher resolutions.

A type of printer that utilizes a laser beam to produce an image on a drum. The light of the laser alters the electrical charge on the drum wherever it hits. The drum is then rolled through a reservoir of toner, which is picked up by the charged portions of the drum. Finally, the toner is transferred to the paper through a combination of heat and pressure. This is also the way copy machines work.

OCR (optical character recognition) is the recognition of printed or written text characters by a computer. This involves photoscanning of the text character-by-character, analysis of the scanned-in image, and then translation of the character image into character codes, such as ASCII, commonly used in data processing

Optical Mark Recognition lets you define check box regions on scanned images. OMR is very fast and can be used for a variety of applications