Glossary

Welcome to the glossary of technical terms. Browse through the alphabetic list to find the term(s) you’re looking for.

L

LAN (Local Area Network):

A communications networkconnected by cables and confined to a single office or building. It enables a group of computers to exchange files and share peripheral devices.

Laser Printer:

A printer using laser copier technology to produce high-quality printed material from computer data. The laser charges an electrostatically sensitive drum to accept carbon based toners. The toner is then transferred and fused to paper or transparency material.

LCD (Liquid Crystal Display):

A flat panel of tiny cells used on most mobile computers in place of a monitor.

LCD Panel:

A device that is connected to a computer via cabling to project a computer monitor display through an overhead projector.

Lossless Compression:

A form of compression where no data is lost, and therefore, does not affect image quality. TIFF is a lossless file format.

Lossy Compression:

A form of compression that attempts to discard unnecessary data. This data loss can affect the quality of the image. JPEG is a lossy file format.

Lossless Encoding:

A data compression or encoding algorithm that does not lose or discard any input data during the encoding process.

Lossy Encoding:

A data compression or encoding algorithm that loses input data during the encoding process to gain a better compression ratio. JPEG is an example of a lossy encoding method.

LPI (Lines Per Inch):

The frequency of horizontal and vertical lines in a halftone screen.

Luminance:

The brightness, darkness, and contrast information of an image.