Peripherals

EPOS (electronic point of sale) tills used in supermarkets form part of a computer system with various input and output peripheral devices attached to the till, including: electronic scales for weighing produce, barcode reader for looking up prices using barcodes, swipe card reader for reading bank cards, numeric keypad for inputting prices manually, LCD (liquid crystal display) screen for outputting purchase details.

a) Digital cameras are gradually being developed that are as good as conventional cameras. They have various electronic devices inside, including:

b) LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) screen used as a view-finder and for viewing the pictures after they have been taken.

c) CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) consisting of thousands of photo-transistors (light-sensitive transistors - a transistor is an electronic switch). It creates the pictures as a set of dots or pixels (picture elements).

d) Memory cards e.g. flash cards - solid state memory (electronic integrated circuits, i.e. chips, used for storing the pictures).

There is no delay in getting pictures from digital cameras because there is no film requiring chemical processing. They can be attached to a computer to directly transfer pictures for editing using special software and unwanted pictures can be deleted. However, they cost more than conventional cameras and the quality is not quite as good. You also need to buy rechargeable batteries and a photo-quality colour printer with high printing costs for paper, ink, etc. Two important features when buying a digital camera are:

a) picture quality or resolution. The resolution of a camera is measured in pixels and given as two numbers, indicating how many pixels there are across the image and how many going down the image e.g. 1280 by 960 (or 1280x960).

b) the number of pictures the camera can store. The higher the resolution, i.e. the more pixels, the more memory is required to store the pictures. Data can be compressed to allow more pictures to be stored.

Storage devices are used to store data and programs that are not being used by the processor. They usually consist of:

a) storage media in the form of a circular disk or a tape where the data is stored

b) adisk or tape drive that moves the media past a read/write head that reads the data from and writes data to the storage media.

Read only media enable the user to both read data from and write data to the media.

Read and write media can only be used for reading data i.e. the stored data cannot be changed in any way.

Removable storage enables the user to change the media and transfer it to another computer.

Fixed storage does not allow the media to be changed or transferred to another computer.

Other factors that vary between storage devices include:

a) the speed at which the drive moves the media past the read/write head and reads or writes data to the storage media

b) the capacity of the media i.e. how much data can be stored on each disk or tape

c) the cost of the drive and the media.

There are various types of printers for out-putting text and graphics to paper. Some types of printers are mono (print in black and white only) and others can print in colour. The speed, quality and cost of printing varies between different types of printer. Some are designed for printing text and are not really suited to printing graphics. Data can take many forms and there is a wide variety of input, output, storage and communication peripherals.