Inkjet Printer Technology Demystified
The invention of the Ink Jet printer virtually revolutionized affordable printing options for personal computer owners. Before Ink Jet printers, a person shopping for a home printer had to choose between a high price, as in a laser printer, or low print quality, as in the dot matrix printers. Then, in the mid 1980’s, the Ink Jet printer came along and gave home printer users the best of both worlds. The Ink Jet printer prints a high quality document that is close in appearance to the much more expensive laser printers but costs hundreds of dollars less than the laser printer. And, Ink Jet printers are not solely for home use. There are many different engineering and imaging applications that use the Ink Jet technology. In fact, many wide format plotter and computer aided design (CAD) printing applications use the Ink Jet technology.
In the most basic terms, an Ink Jet printer works by placing extremely tiny drops of ink onto paper to create an image. These dots of ink are obviously microscopic, in fact a human hair is larger in diameter than these ink dots.
When you open up your Ink Jet printer to replace an ink cartridge, you are most likely dealing with what is referred to as the print head assembly. The print head assembly has three main parts: the print head, the ink cartridge, and the print head stepper motor. The print head is the part of the print head assembly that houses the nozzles that are used to spray the microscopic ink dots onto the paper. The ink cartridge is the container that holds the ink that is used in the printing process. Depending on what type of Ink Jet printer you have, you might have two separate ink cartridges – one for black ink and one for colored ink. Some printer models even combine the ink cartridge and the print head into one component. The last piece of the print head assembly is the print head stepper motor. The print head stepper motor is basically the mechanism that moves the print head and ink cartridge back and forth across the paper during the printing process. Many Ink Jet printer models also use a belt and stabilizer bar in conjunction with the print head assembly. The belt is used to attach the print head stepper motor to the print head assembly while the stabilizer bar helps maintain precision with all of the movement involved in the whole printing process.
The second main component of the Ink Jet printer is the paper feed assembly. This component does basically what it says it does: it feeds the paper through the printer during the printing process. The paper feed assembly is comprised of paper feeder, rollers, and a paper feed stepper motor. The paper feeder is simply the component of the printer that holds the paper. The rollers pull the paper into the printer and move the paper through the printer during the printer process. The paper feed stepper motor is the mechanism that powers the rollers.