subject: How Inkjet Printers Work [print this page] From high-end graphic designers and newspaper printers to home offices and even shops, there is barely a work place in the world that doesn't have or need an inkjet printer. There ease of use combined with consistent, reliable quality has seen them take printers out of the dark ages and into the mainstream, and now they're used for everth8ng from typing up notes or printing invoices, to drafting publications and portfolios.
First produced in the 1980s at a predictably high price, it wasn't until inkjet printers became widely available in the 90s that the price started to drop low enough for everyday consumers. Before these were basic dot matrix printers which were, to say the least, slow noisy and far inferior in terms of quality. Plus they relied on a particular type of printing papers, as opposed to the inkjet's flexibility. They also introduced colour printing to the masses, pushing printing technology forward at a rapid rate.
But how do they work? Well it is said that the method was discovered by mistake after a researchers accidently touched an ink-filled syringe with a hot soldering iron, causing a drop of ink to leap from the nib of the syringe. Basically, it is an entirely non-impact printing where the nozzles of the ink cartridges pass over the paper or other media and liquid ink is squirted onto the surface to create an image or line of text.
Like all printers (even typewriters), an aligned print head scans the page horizontally and is run by a small motor, which pushes it left and right across the page. Once a row of ink has been printed, the revolving mechanism in the printer pulls the paper up slightly, so the next row can be printed. Not long after the inkjet printer was invented, it quickly adapted to print a horizontal and vertical row of ink in the same pass, so as to effectively half the printing time. When you consider that most domestic inkjet printers take as little as half a second to print across a page, which would be about 2,500 dots of ink, this means that each nozzle is reacting at an average response time of around 1/5000th of a second each, which is alarmingly quick. Of course, the more advanced the printer, the quicker it can often print too.
As the ink has to be fired incredibly accurately, the printer nozzles are as fine as a strand of hair and, in early models, were prone to getting clogged with ink; but this led to better quality ink. A faulty printer nozzle, or printer driver which calculates how much ink is fired through which nozzle, will result in too much ink landing on the page, creating blotches. Another similar problem with inkjet printers was that just printed documents often smudged if not left to dry for a moment, but this too has lead to better quality ink and, like inkjet printers themselves, superior technology for less money.
So, instead of computers making paper redundant and offices relying solely on digital documents, printer technology is thriving, and inkjet printers are just as useful today as they have been for 20 years.
