Page printer
A printer that composes and outputs a whole page at a time, unlike line and character printers.
In the old taxonomy of printers by how much they commit at once, the page printer sits at the top: it rasterises a complete page in memory before anything reaches paper. Laser and LED printers are the archetypes, along with page-mode inkjets. A line printer commits a whole row at a time; a character (serial) printer, one glyph at a time. The term took hold with the laser printer in the 1970s and 80s, when page description languages like PostScript and PCL made it possible to lay the page out digitally. Page printers are rated in pages per minute, not characters per second.