How do Inkjet Cartridge Printers Work?

Inkjet cartridge printers were introduced and mass produced to the consumer market in the 1980's. In the 1990's the prices for inkjet printers dropped to an affordable price for the technology it had for the consumer. If you have heard the phrase, "Bubble Jet" then Canon inkjet cartridges is the company you think of as the inventor. Canon coined the "Bubble Jet" technology phrase on all of their printers in 1977. Rumor was that an engineer touched an ink filled syringe with a hot soldering iron and caused ink to drop out from the heat.

Inkjet printers first started out as a three color inkjet cartridge printer. Then four color inkjet printers came along and were far superior at the same cost than the three color printers. Three color printing is known as RGB, which is three phosphor colors of Red, Green, and Blue with limited color gamuts. Four color printing is known as CMYK, which has even smaller gamuts and have four phosphor colors of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. Six to eight color printers are also common and have very large gamuts.

The inkjet printer's function is to place very small droplets of ink on the printing paper to create the image from your screen. These droplets of ink are emitted from nozzles as the motor assembly moves the print head back and forth on its horizontal strip track. If the printer resolution is 300 (DPI) Dots Per Inch, then at least 2,500 dots of ink are sprayed across the page. Another form of printing is (DOD) Drop On Demand, which has tiny nozzles turning on and off thousands of times per second controlled by a software driver. Over time, these inkjet printer nozzles get clogged or run out of ink, which is why they need to be recycled, cleaned, rebuilt and refilled with ink to be used again. We recycle all of our inkjet cartridges when we buy the customer's empty cartridges. Not only does it recycle material, but it is good to keep the planet green. This form of inkjet printing is called non-impact printing.

Many of the inkjet printers today use thermo-technology printing. Thermo-technology printing is the process of heat causing a needle to fire ink onto the printing paper. Canon inkjet cartridges and Hewlett-Packard HP inkjet cartridges use thermo-technology in their printers. Small heating components are used to heat the ink to eject it out of the print head nozzles, which has as many as 600 nozzles that are about the diameter of your hair. High resolution 9600 x 2400 DPI printers are available by the Canon PIXMA iP6700D photo printer cartridges.

Piezo-Electric technology is mainly used in Epson inkjet cartridges, which consists of a Piezo crystal at the back of the ink injector reservoir and flexes when electric current flows through it, thus putting pressure on the cavity of the injector reservoir and forcing ink droplets our of the Piezo injector nozzles. Piezo-Electric nozzles allow for complete control of the size and shape of the ink droplet to be released. The ink also does not need to be heated or cooled, which saves time and can focus on absorption, rather than heat resistance for the ink.

Printers can create color images by dithering the main colors very close together. The 4 color CYMK or 3 color RGB phosphors can be dithered together to create images. However, 3 color printers have trouble printing black because it is hard to dither. The black cartridge is also separate from the RGB cartridge, which makes a 4 color inkjet printer cartridge far superior.