How Does an Inkjet Printer Work?
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VIsual Communication
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Printers are a mainstay of many business, educational and home settings. From greeting cards to spreadsheets, printers assist in producing visual communication tools. Among the most versatile printers is the inkjet printer, a technological advancement that allows for clean, crisp reproduction that is exponentially faster than its predecessors.
Printer History
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The first electronic printers were created in 1938. They involved a dry printing process using an electro-charged cylinder, chemicals and a photographic transfer of the image onto paper. The first copier pushed out 7 black and white copies per minute. Copying machines have developed by leaps and bounds since then. Dot matrix printers, the kind you see in used by secretaries in 1970s school films, could print nearly 200 characters per second, although each dot on the characters was fairly visible to the naked eye. Eventually they were overshadowed by the more common inkjet printers.
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Inkjet Printer Mechanics
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Inkjet printers work by literally spraying small droplets of ink onto paper at high speeds. First, whatever software you are using has to process the command of sending your requested document to be printed. The software sends the message through the universal serial bus (USB) connection and to the inkjet printer.
Inkjet printers use dozens of nozzles that are responsible for spraying the ink. For thermal bubble inkjet printers, the nozzles are bubbles that collapse when heat is applied. The collapse creates a vacuum which sucks the ink through the nozzle and onto the paper. With piezoelectric inkjet printers, piezo crystals vibrate in and out of the nozzles, pushing ink onto the paper and reloading the nozzles with more ink.
Once the print command is sent, the information sits in a memory buffer before the inkjet printer begins its work. If it hasn't already happened on a previous printing, the inkjet printer first does a self-cleaning to make sure all the heads are clean and will print clearly in either black and white or color. After the cleaning, the cartridges move along a stable traction rail and "spray" the information onto the page, line by line. The inkjet dots measure about 60 microns in diameter, which is smaller than human hair.
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