What Makes Printer Cartridges Function?

Every day you rely on a printer for your documents and presentations

, but have you ever considered the mechanics of how printers really work? All too often we take for granted the items in our homes and offices that we utilize every day, never stopping to question how something works until that thing stops working properly. If you've never investigated the procedure before, learning how printers function can actually be pretty interesting.

If your home has a printer, you probably own an inkjet printer. Inkjet printers have been the most popular printers to purchase since their introduction into the marketplace in the late 1980s. And what makes them work? When you look at a picture or paper printed from an inkjet printer you may see just clear, straight lines. Take a more detailed look. Placing the paper under a magnifying glass to examine the printing up close would reveal that the lines are actually created by very small droplets of ink. The inkjet drops extremely small droplets of different colored ink onto the paper to create the image that you want to have printed, including photographs and documents that are just black and white.

The dots of ink are so tiny that their diameter is comparable to the thinness of a human hair! As a general rule, inkjet printers come loaded with a few standard colors. In order to create a variety of colors, the printer puts differently colored dots together. Take, for instance, that blue and yellow will be combined to make green and that red and blue make purple.

Inkjet printers and laser printers are totally different machines. As previously stated, tiny droplets of ink sprayed by the inkjet printer make the pictures appear. Laser printers are slightly different,however, because they use dry ink, also called toner, instead of wet ink. Then, through a combination of static electricity pulses and heat, the ink is bonded to the paper. The dry ink powder is also called laser toner, although they look like regular printer cartridges.

If you could take a printer to pieces, at its core, you would find the print head. This head contains a number of small nozzles that spray the little droplets of ink onto the paper. The ink cartridge is placed in this area of the printer and, with the aid of a print head stepper motor, quickly whizzes back and forth across the paper.

When you print something off from your printer, you kick off a chain of events. Firstly, the data is transmitted to the printer driver. The driver then translates the data into a language that the printer can understands and makes sure that the printer is ready to print. The printer will have a short lag time before it starts printing if it hasn't been used in a while because it needs to self-clean. Once it is clean, it will start to pull the paper into the printer. The motor will halt for a split second as the ink is sprayed onto the page, then continue. It happens so fast, however, that it seems like it moves continuously. This is how the document goes from your computer through the printer to come out printed on a piece of paper.

by: Tony Fliven

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