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Everything You Need To Know About Inkjet Printers

By: Jessica Pierce

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If you are considering buying an inkjet printer, then you should first learn about the history and technology of inkjets.

In the international consumer market, four manufacturers make up the majority of inkjet printer sales: Hewlett-Packard, Canon, Epson, and Lexmark.

And within the inkjet printer market these days, there exists three main technologies employed: thermal, piezoelectric, and continuous.

Thermal inkjets
The majority of the consumer inkjet printers (Lexmark, Hewlett-Packard, and Canon) use print cartridges with a series of tiny electrically heated chambers made by photo lithography.

To produce an image, the printer generates a pulse of current through the heating elements resulting in a steam explosion in the chamber to create a bubble, which propels a droplet of ink onto the paper (hence Canon's tradename of Bubblejet for its inkjets).

Understand that thermal inkjets have no relation to thermal printers, which produce images by heating thermal paper, as found on older fax machines, cash register, ATM receipt, and lottery ticket printers.

Piezoelectric inkjets
Nearly all commercial and industrial ink jet printers and a number of consumer printers (Epson) utilize a piezoelectric material in an ink-filled chamber behind every nozzle in place of a heating element.

As a voltage is exerted, the piezoelectric material alters size or shape, which creates a pressure pulse in the fluid pushing a droplet of ink through the nozzle.

This is basically the same device as the thermal inkjet however it creates the pressure pulse by using a different physical principle.

Piezoelectric (also called Piezo) ink jets allow a wider diversity of inks than thermal or continuous ink jets but the print heads are more costly.

Continuous ink jet
The continuous ink jet technique is used commercially for marking and coding products and packages.

In continuous ink jet technology, a high-pressure pump directs liquid ink from a reservoir through a gunbody and a microscopic nozzle, generating a continuous stream of ink droplets via the Plateau-Rayleigh instability.

A piezoelectric crystal creates an acoustic wave as it vibrates within the gunbody and forces the spurt of liquid to break into droplets at regular intervals - 64,000 to 165,000 drops per second may be accomplished.

The ink droplets are introduced to an electrostatic field created by a charging electrode as they form, the field varies according to the degree of drop deflection required. This results in a controlled, variable electrostatic charge on each droplet.

Charged droplets are separated by one or more uncharged "guard droplets" to reduce electrostatic repulsion among adjacent droplets.

Inkjet advantages
In comparison to prior consumer-oriented color printers, inkjets have a number of advantages.

Inkjet printers are quieter during operation than impact daisy wheel or dot matrix printers.

They can print smoother, finer details through advanced print head resolution, and now many consumer inkjets with photographic-quality printing are widely available.

In contrast to more costly technologies like dye sublimations, thermal wax, and laser printers, inkjets have the advantage of practically no warm up time and lower cost per page (except when compared to laser printers).

For some inkjet printers, monochrome ink sets are on hand from either the printer manufacturer or third-party suppliers. Monochrome ink sets allow the inkjet printer to compete with the silver-based photographic papers usually used in black-and-white photography, and they offer the equivalent series of tones - neutral, "warm" or "cold". When switching between monochrome and full-color ink sets, it is crucial to wash out the old ink from the print head with a cleaning cartridge.

Inkjet disadvantages
Inkjet printers may have a number of disadvantages:

The ink is often very costly. (For a average OEM cartridge priced at $15, having 5 mL of ink, the ink in effect costs $3000 per liter—or $8000 per gallon). According to the BBC (2003), "The cost of ink has been the subject of an Office of Fair Trading investigation. A magazine has accused manufacturers with a lack of transparency concerning the price of ink and called for an industry standard for measuring ink cartridge performance".

Lots of "intelligent" ink cartridges include a microchip which communicates the approximate ink level to the printer; this could trigger the printer to display an error message, or incorrectly notify the user that the ink cartridge is empty. In some cases, these messages can be disregarded, but a few inkjet printers will refuse to print with a cartridge that considers itself depleted, in order to inhibit consumers from refilling cartridges. So, Epson incorporates a chip which stops printing when the chip claims the cartridge is empty, although a researcher who over-rode the system learned that he was able to print nearly 38% more top quality pages, even though the chip indicated the cartridge was depleted.

The lifetime of inkjet prints produced by inkjets using aqueous inks is limited; they will in the end fade and the color balance may possibly change. On the other hand, prints created from solvent-based inkjets may last several years prior to fading, even when subjected to direct sunlight, and so-called "archival inks" have been produced for use in aqueous-based machines which provide extended life.

Because the ink used in many consumer inkjets is water-soluble, care must be taken with inkjet-printed documents to avoid even the slightest drop of water, which can cause serious "blurring" or "running".. Likewise, water-based highlighter markers can blur inkjet-printed documents.

The extremely narrow inkjet nozzles are susceptible to clogging with dried ink. The ink consumed cleaning them - either during cleaning invoked by the user, or in a lot of cases, performed automatically by the printer on a routine schedule - can account for a considerable proportion of the total ink installed in the machine.

These disadvantages have been addressed in a variety of ways:

1. 3rd-party ink suppliers sell ink cartridges at significantly reduced prices (at least 10%-30% of OEM cartridge prices, sometimes up to 80%) and also bulk ink and cartridge self-refill kits at yet lower prices.

2. Numerous vendors' "intelligent" ink cartridges have been reverse-engineered. It is now possible to buy low-cost devices to reset such cartridges to report themselves as full, so that they can be refilled lots of times.

3. Print life span is greatly dependent on the formulation and quality of the ink as well as the paper chosen. The first inkjet printers, intended for home and small office applications, employed dye-based inks. Even the top dye-based inks are not as durable as pigment-based inks, which are now obtainable for numerous inkjet printers.

4. Some inkjet printers now make use of pigment based ink, which is water insoluble.

5. Inkjet nozzles can be cleaned and unclogged by soaking in shallow water for 1 minute.

Overall expense
Even with numerous existing options for cost-saving, inkjet printing using desktop printers is costly over time due to expensive replacement ink cartridges with much lower capacity than laser-printer cartridges. Unless photo-realistic reproduction is necessary, value-minded consumers often favor laser printers for medium- to high-volume printing applications.

Underlying business model
A common business model for inkjet printers involves selling the new printer near production cost, while dramatically marking up the price of the proprietary ink cartridges.

Some inkjet printers impose this product tying using microchips within the cartridges to stop the use of third-party or refilled ink cartridges. The microchips function by storing the amount of ink left over in the cartridge, which is updated as printing occurs.

Expiration dates for the ink may also be used. Even if the cartridge is refilled, the microchip will notify the printer that the cartridge is empty. For a few printers, third-party vendors offer special circuit flashers that can reset the quantity of residual ink to full.

Some manufacturers, most notably Epson and Hewlett Packard, have been accused of selling ink cartridges that indicate a empty state while a significant amount of ink is left over.

A 2007 study found that the majority of printers waste a considerable amount of ink when they declare a cartridge to be empty. Single-ink cartridges were found to have approximately 20% of their ink remaining, though actual figures vary from 9% to 64% of the total capacity of the cartridge, depending on the brand and model of printer. This problem is further compounded with the use of multi-ink cartridges, which are stated empty as soon as one color runs low.

In recent years, a lot of consumers have begun to challenge the business practices of printer companies, such as charging up to $8,000 per gallon for printer ink.

Alternatives for consumers are inexpensive replacement cartridges, provided by 3rd parties, and refilling cartridges using refill kits. Due to the large difference in price caused by OEM markups, there are many companies specializing in alternative ink cartridges.

Nearly all printer companies oppose refilling disposable cartridges or buying after market ink cartridges to stop the loss in revenue.

Using incorrect inks may also result in poor image quality due to differences in viscosity, which could affect the amount of ink ejected in a drop, and color consistency, and could even cause damage to the print head. Nonetheless, the use of alternative cartridges and inks has been gaining in popularity, and threatening the business model of printer companies.

Printer manufacturers such as HP, Lexmark, and Epson have employed patents and the DMCA to introduce lawsuits against third-party vendors.

An anti-trust class-action lawsuit was even launched against HP and an office supply chain, Staples, charging that HP paid Staples $100 million to keep cheaper third-party ink cartridges off the shelves.

In 2007 Eastman Kodak entered the inkjet market with its own line of Multifunction printers based on a marketing model that differed from the typical model (of selling the printer at a loss while making huge profits on replacement ink cartridges). Charging slightly more for its printers, Kodak proclaimed that consumers could save up to 50 percent on printing by buying its inexpensive cartridges filled with the company’s proprietary pigmented colorants while avoiding the potential problems associated with off-brand inks.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

The author has a extensive history with computer technology, both with software and hardware. If you find this article of importance, please feel free to make a copy. For further information, click on the following links: canon selphy es30 OR hp color laserjet cp1518ni printer

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