1977: The Xerox 9700 was brought to market.The IBM 3800 was used for high-volume printing on continuous stationery, and achieved speeds of 215 pages per minute (ppm), at a resolution of 240 dots per inch (dpi). It was designed for data centers, where it replaced line printers attached to mainframe computers.

1976: The first commercial implementation of a laser printer, the IBM 3800, was released.In 1972, Starkweather worked with Butler Lampson and Ronald Rider to add a control system and character generator, resulting in a printer called EARS (Ethernet, Alto Research character generator, Scanned laser output terminal)-which later became the Xerox 9700 laser printer. After transferring to the recently formed Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) in 1971, Starkweather adapted a Xerox 7000 copier to make SLOT (Scanned Laser Output Terminal). In 1969, Gary Starkweather, who worked in Xerox's product development department, had the idea of using a laser beam to 'draw' an image of what was to be copied directly onto the copier drum. In the 1960s, the Xerox Corporation held a dominant position in the photocopier market. Gary Starkweather (seen here in 2009) invented the laser printer. Over the decades, quality and speed have increased as prices have decreased, and the once cutting-edge printing devices are now ubiquitous. Invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, laser printers were introduced for the office and then home markets in subsequent years by IBM, Canon, Xerox, Apple, Hewlett-Packard and many others. Laser printing differs from traditional xerography as implemented in analog photocopiers in that in the latter, the image is formed by reflecting light off an existing document onto the exposed drum. As with digital photocopiers, laser printers employ a xerographic printing process.

The drum then selectively collects electrically-charged powdered ink ( toner), and transfers the image to paper, which is then heated to permanently fuse the text, imagery, or both, to the paper. It produces high-quality text and graphics (and moderate-quality photographs) by repeatedly passing a laser beam back and forth over a negatively-charged cylinder called a 'drum' to define a differentially-charged image. Laser printing is an electrostatic digital printing process.

Color laser printer and scanner