Inkjet printers provide an inexpensive method of high-resolution color output. In this video, you’ll learn about inkjet printer operation, ink cartridges, print heads, feed rollers, carriage and belt, and inkjet printer calibration.
Inkjet or ink dispersion printers can create high-resolution output in, both, black and white and color. The technology itself is relatively inexpensive, and the printers themselves operate relatively quietly. The output on these inkjet printers is also high resolution, and many people will output graphics and photographs using an inkjet printer.
One of the downsides to inkjet, however, is the ink that is used. It’s relatively expensive, and it is a proprietary method that is specific to the manufacturer of the printer. This ink also tends to fade over time, so you may find that an output that you create today looks very different a year from now.
And one of the ongoing problems with inkjet printers is that the type of ink that we use tends to clog very easily. The industry has a number of different ways to address these clogging issues, and they tend to vary between different printer manufacturers.
The process of creating output on an inkjet printer is relatively straightforward. Drops of ink are moved from a cartridge onto a piece of paper to create the final output. Normally, these cartridges have four different colors associated with them. Usually, it’s a black, a cyan, magenta, and yellow.
You’ll sometimes see this referred to as CMYK for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and the K is for Key, which is black. These are often installed in the printer as individual cartridges, although there are some printer models where all of these colors are within the same cartridge inside the printer.
Some of these inkjet printers will combine the ink cartridge with the print head itself. This is an example of that, where you have a cartridge containing the ink, and on the bottom of the cartridge is the print head itself. This means that when you replace the print cartridge, you’re also replacing and getting a brand new print head. Other inkjet printer models may keep these separately, where there is a separate ink cartridge and a separate print head located in different parts of the printer.
Here’s a close up of that print head. You can see that it is a very small print head, and it is very delicate. If you are going to clean this print head, you have to be very careful not to damage that. This is also a relatively simple piece of engineering, and it’s relatively inexpensive, which is why many printer manufacturers combine both the ink cartridge and the print head onto the same device. That way, when you replace the ink cartridge, you’re also getting a brand new print head.
You can see that the printer itself can be relatively small, mostly because this is a simple design, certainly much simpler when you compare it to something like a laser printer. There are usually feed rollers in the front. You can see the feed rollers here that are right above the piece of paper. They’re designed to pull the paper into the printer and all the way through, past the print heads, into the other side.
Some larger inkjet printers can support duplex printing, where they will print on both sides of the page. This may be a feature built into the printer, or it may require additional hardware to be installed. You’ll need to check with the manufacturer of your printer to see if duplex printing is supported. Here’s a closer view of those feed rollers. You can see that they do get a bit dirty over time, so if you’re having a problem pulling that paper into the printer, you may just need to clean off those feed rollers.