Friday, June 24, 2011

works

How Inkjet Printers works

Inkjet printers are the most commonly used printers today. They operate by spraying droplets of ink on the paper which form the characters or the illustrations on the paper. Inkjet printers became popular in mid 1990’s and since then have replaced dot matrix printers due to their better print quality and faster print rate.

Most inkjet printers now have USB ( Universal Serial Bus) port to connect to the PC and laptop but many inkjet printers still use parallel ports to connect to the CPU.

Components/Architecture

The print head in the Inkjet printers consists of the nozzles or small holes through which the ink is sprayed on the paper. There are two different method/technologies, which are used by inkjet printer: thermal bubble and print piezoelectric.

There are separate cartridges used by the inkjet printers for black and color printing. Some cartridges itself contain the print heads.

While printing, the cartridge moves horizontally back and forth on the paper and the stepper motor facilitates this movement.

There is a stabilizer attached to the motor to control its movement There is also a belt in side the printer which attaches the motor and the print head together.

While printing, we keep the paper on the feeder tray and the paper is pulled in by the rollers and then dispensed out after the printing.

Types of Inkjet Printer

In inkjet printers, which employ thermal method to print, there is a heater which when receives the current is heated and then drives the ink out of the nozzle. The ink bubble formed due to this tension forces more ink out of the cartridge.

In piezoelectric based printers, piezoelectric material, crystals attached to the nozzles force the ink out which then print the pattern on the paper. This method has been patented by Epson. Piezoelectric based inkjet printers give better quality of images.

Though inkjet printers give better quality of printing but, if one needs to print many documents daily then the cost of printing may escalate due to limited number of pages which each cartridge can print. Depending upon the manufacturer, cartridge may print 300-600 pages varying on the usage and type. So, its up to a user which kind of printer does he opts for. Although ink jet printers have low initial costs, their print rate per page is high.

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