You frequently utilize a printer for your everyday needs, but have you ever considered the nuts and bolts of how printers work? All too often we take for granted the items in our homes and offices that we utilize every day, never stopping to question how something works until that thing stops working properly. It's actually pretty interesting discovering how printers work if you've never looked into the process before.
If you have a printer in your home, it’s most likely an inkjet printer. Inkjet printers have been the most popular printers to purchase since their introduction into the marketplace in the late 1980’s. And how do they function? Sometimes when you look at a page printed from an inkjet printer, you'll see just clean, straight lines. Check it out closer. Placing the paper under a magnifying glass to examine the printing up close would reveal that the lines are actually created by very small droplets of ink. The inkjet drops extremely small droplets of different colored ink onto the paper to create the image that you want to have printed, including photographs and documents that are just black and white.
The dots of ink are incredibly tiny, with a diameter even thinner than that of a human hair! As a general rule, inkjet printers come loaded with a few standard colors. In order to create a variety of colors, the printer puts differently colored dots together. For instance it may put blue and red together to make purple, or yellow and blue together to make green.
Inkjet printers and laser printers are totally different machines. As stated, inkjet printers use small dots of wet ink in order to make the pictures appear on the paper. Laser printers are slightly different,however, because they use dry ink, also called toner, instead of wet ink. The ink is then bonded to the paper by the use of static electricity and heat. The dry ink powder is also called printer cartridges, although they look like regular laser toner.
If you could take a printer to pieces, at its core, you would find the print head. The print head has tiny nozzles that spray the tiny droplets of ink efficiently onto the page. The ink cartridge goes into this section of the printer and is moved back and forth across the paper thanks to a print head stepper motor.
When you print something off from your printer, you kick off a chain of events. Firstly, the data is transmitted to the printer driver. The driver then translates the data into a language that the printer can understands and makes sure that the printer is ready to print. The printer will have a short lag time before it starts printing if it hasn't been used in a while because it needs to self-clean. Once it is clean, it will start to pull the paper into the printer. The motor will stop for a very short amount of time, a fraction of a second, as the ink is sprayed onto the page. It happens so fast, however, that it seems like it moves continuously. This is how the document goes from your computer through the printer to come out printed on a piece of paper.
