How Printer Ink Works
The inkjet cartridge is a small marvel of technology. When you want to print something, usually all you have to do is just click the mouse or push a few buttons, sit back, and relax as the printer does its work.
But what goes on under that hood as the printer shakes and rumbles? Let's find out.
First of all, inkjet printers create those beautiful pages by spraying the paper with many thousands of tiny ink droplets per second from nozzles in the ink cartridge. A typical inkjet cartridge has 300-600 of these nozzles.
The droplets are only 50-60 microns in diameter, thinner than a human hair, and drops of different colors can be combined to create nearly any color imaginable!
While laser printers use dry ink (toner cartridges), static electricity, and heat to print pages, inkjet printers use a liquid ink.
How is the ink sprayed? There are two main types of inkjet printers: bubble jet and piezoelectric. Bubble jets, developed by HP and Canon, use an electric current to heat a tiny piece of metal in the ink cartridge. As the metal heats up, it forms a bubble which pushes ink out through the nozzle and onto the printer paper.
The piezoelectric method was developed by Epson and uses piezo crystals in the inkjet cartridge. A tiny electric current causes the crystals to vibrate. As the crystals expand, they force ink out of the nozzle.
When printing a page, the printer motor pauses for a fraction of a second as thousands of ink droplets are sprayed from the ink cartridge, then the cartridge moves slightly, sprays again, moves again, and so on. When it reaches the end of the line, the paper is moved up, and the cartridge reverses and repeats the inkjet dance. All this happens so quickly that it seems to be continuous.
Whether you have an inkjet from Epson or an ink cartridge from Cannon or HP, now you can appreciate and understand the wonderful technology, the hard work and the intensive research that went into creating these remarkable inkjet printers and their ink cartridges.