Input Output

Devices

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Table of contents
Table of contents.................................2
Input / Output device..........................3
Input Devices ......................................4
Keyboard.............................................5
Mouse.............................................. .....5
Touchpad’s & trackballs.....................6
Joystick................................................6
Touch screen.......................................7
Scanner................................................7
Digital Camera.....................................8
Graphics Tablet...................................8
Microphone..........................................9
Light Pen..............................................9
Output Devices .................................10
Visual Display Unit (VDU).................11
Printers...............................................11
Dot Matrix Printer......................................................................................................11
Inkjet Printers.............................................................................................................12
Laser Printer...............................................................................................................12

Plotter.................................................13
Speaker..............................................13

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Input / Output device
An output device is any piece of computer hardware equipment used to communicate the results
of data processing carried out by an information processing system (such as a computer) to the
outside world.

In computing, input/output, or I/O, refers to the communication between an information

processing system (such as a computer), and the outside world. Inputs are the signals or data
sent to the system, and outputs are the signals or data sent by the system to the outside.

The most common input devices used by the computer are the keyboard and mouse. The
keyboard allows the entry of textual information while the mouse allows the selection of a point on
the screen by moving a screen cursor to the point and pressing a mouse button. The most
common outputs are monitors and speakers.

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Input Devices
Introduction

Input devices are used to put data & instructions into a computer. There are 2 main types of input
device: Direct & Manual.

o Direct input devices: - They can input large amounts of data quickly and accurately
without any need for human intervention. Barcode readers and optical mark readers are
examples of direct input devices.
o Manual Input Devices: - They are used by people to enter data by hand. The most
commonly used input devices are Mouse and the Keyboard.

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Keyboard

The Keyboard is the most common type of input device. Ordinary computer keyboards have their
keys arranged in a similar way to those on a typewriter. This way of arranging the keys is called
QWERTY because of the order in which the keys appear on the first row of letters. This layout
was originally designed to separate common letter pairs, in order to prevent nearby type-bars on
a manual typewriter jamming the mechanism when typing at speed. Keyboards are now available
with different layouts designed help users type more quickly and comfortably. Computer
Keyboards also have extra function keys which can carry out different tasks depending on the
software being used.

The whole CPU inside a Keyboard

Mouse
A mouse is a pointing device. It is the next most common type of input device after the keyboard.
Mouse is moved around by the user on a flat surface next to the computer. When a mouse is
moved, a small ball underneath turns, which directs the cursor to move. An increasingly type of
mouse is the optical mouse. The distance and direction the mouse has moved is worked out from
differences in the pictures by a processor inside the mouse. Information about the movement of
the mouse is then sent to the computer as a set of coordinates. An optical mouse also generates
a light.

A ball mouse An optical mouse

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Touchpad’s & trackballs
Touch pads & trackballs are the same; they are also types of pointing devices. They are often
used instead of mouse on portable computers which are laptops.

A track ball A touch pad

Joystick
The main use of joystick is to play computer games by controlling the way that something moves
on the screen. Joysticks can be used to control movement from side to side, up and down &
diagonally and horizontally. A joystick will have few buttons which can be used to make something
happen like making a character in a game jump or attack or defense etc.

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Touch screen
Touch screen can detect exactly where on its surface it has been touched. There are several
ways in which this can be done. One common type of touch screen uses beams of invisible infra
– red light which shine from top to bottom and side to side in front of the screen. The beams of
light form a grid that divides up the screen. Touch screens are used mainly because they are
easy to keep clean and re program when changes are to be made.

Scanner
A scanner can be used to input pictures or text into the computer. There are 2 main types of
scanners: hand - held & flat – bed scanners work by passing a beam of bright light over an
image. Data about the amount of light reflected by the different parts of the picture is collected by
sensors inside the scanners. This data is used to produce a digital image of the picture that the
computer can display on the screen. Once the image/text has been scanned it can be saved and
changed using some special software's.

Hand Held Scanner Flat Bed Scanner

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Digital Camera
A digital camera can store many more pictures than an ordinary camera. The storage depends on
the memory space. We can also shoot videos with it. The images & videos can be transferred
using a USB to the computer. They are other common type of digital camera. Webcams can take
photographs and capture moving images which can be saved on the computer and can be sent
through internet while chatting. The people who are chatting can view each other on their screen
(live).

Graphics Tablet
A graphics tablet consists of a flat surface and a stylus(pen), which can be used to produce free
hand drawings or trace around shapes. When the stylus touches the surface of the graphics
tablet, data about its position is sent to the computer. This data is used to produce on the screen
an exact copy of what is being drawn on the surface of the graphics tablet.

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Microphone

A microphone is used to input sound into a computer system. Microphones are often used for
voice recognition systems, which convert sounds made by a user into text on the screen or
commands the computer can carry out. Systems like this are very useful for people who can’t use
ordinary input devices such as mouse and keyboard. As computers become more powerful in the
future, voice recognition will be a much more common input method for all computer users.

Light Pen
A light pen is a small “pen - shaped” wand which contains light sensors. The light pen is used to
choose objects or commands on the screen, either by pressing it against the surface of the
screen or by pressing a small switch on its side. This sends a signal to the computer, which then
woks out the light pen’s exact location on the screen. The advantage of the light pen is that,
unlike a “touch – screen”, it doesn’t needs a special screen or screen coating.

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Output Devices
Introduction
Before an output can be produced by a computer it must have an output device connected to it.
The output devices that you are most probably most used to will be the screen (or monitor) and
the printer. Another sort of output that you will have experienced when using a computer is
sound, which is output through a speaker. In the next slides I am going to describe the main
types of devices that are used to get output from a computer.

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Visual Display Unit (VDU)
A visual Display Unit (VDU) or a monitor is an output device that accepts video signal direct from
a computer. Monitors can display graphics, text and video. The size of a monitor is measured in
inches diagonally across the screen; 15, 17, 19 and 21 inch monitors are the most common sizes.
A color monitor can display from 16 to over 1 million different colors. Color monitors are
sometimes called RGB monitors because they accept three separate signals – Red, Green and
blue. Visual Display Unit (VDU)

Printers
A printer is an output device that produces a printout or hard copy of the output from a computer.
There are many types of printer available and which one you choose will depend on how much
you want to pay for the printer, the cost of the paper and the ink it uses, what quality of print you
want and whether you are going to print just text, graphics, or graphics and text together. The
most common types of printer are dot matrix, inkjet and laser printer. The speed of printers can be
measured in characters per second (CPS) or pages per minute (PPM), the higher the values are,
the faster the printer can produce output.

Dot Matrix Printer

A dot matrix printer forms characters and graphics on the paper by producing pattern of dots. If
you look closely at a print out from a dot matrix printer you will see the tiny dots which make up
the printout. The part of the printer which forms the pattern of dots is called the print head. Dot
matrix printers are relatively cheap and so is the stationery that they use. The quality of dot matrix
printer depends on the pins there in print head. ‘9’ pin print will produce poor print and ‘24’ pin
print will produce much good print than the ‘9’ pin print. These printers often make noise.

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Inkjet Printers
Inkjet printers work like Dot Matrix printer (the printouts that they produce are made up of patterns
of very small Dots) but the printer head has a set of tiny holes rather than pins. As the print head
moves across the paper, ink is forced out through the holes to form the image. Inkjet Printers are
very quite to operate and can produce good quality printouts of both graphics and text. Relatively
cheap color graphics can be printed using a color inkjet.

Laser Printer
A laser printer is a common type of computer printer that rapidly produces high quality text and
graphics on plain paper. As with digital photocopiers and MFPs, laser printers employ a
xerographic printing process but differ from analog photocopiers in that the image is produced by
the direct scanning of a laser beam across the printer's photoreceptor. A laser beam projects an
image of the page to be printed onto an electrically charged rotating drum coated with selenium.

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Plotter
A plotter is a vector graphics printing device that connects to a computer. There are two types of
main plotters. Those are pen plotters and electrostatic plotters. Pen plotters print by moving a pen
across the surface of a piece of paper. This means that plotters are restricted to line art, rather
than raster graphics as with other printers. Pen plotters can draw complex line art, including text,
but do so very slowly because of the mechanical movement of the pens.

Speaker
A speaker or speaker system is an electro acoustical transducer that converts an electrical signal
to sound. The term loudspeaker can refer to individual transducers (known as drivers), or to
complete systems consisting of a enclosure incorporating one or more drivers and electrical filter
components. Loudspeakers, just as with other electro acoustic transducers, are the most variable
elements in an audio system and are responsible for the greatest degree of audible differences
between sound systems.

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