Inkjet Technology Guide

Inkjet technology really came into it's own in the late 1990s. Cheap color printing was the attraction and laser printers have taken a long time to reach the same levels of affordability. For photo printing at home there really is no other choice.

Inkjet technology has always improved

The ability of inkjet's to produce color has always been their major advantage over laser printers. This is also what makes them so popular with home users. Since the late 1990s, when the price of color laser printers began to reach levels which made them viable for home users, this advantage has been eroded. However, in that time the development of inkjet's capable of photographic-quality output has done much to help them retain their popularity with general consumers.

The down side is that although inkjet's are generally cheaper to buy than lasers, they are much more expensive to maintain. Cartridges need to be changed more frequently and the special coated paper required to produce high-quality output is very expensive. When it comes to comparing the cost per page, inkjet's work out about ten times more expensive than laser printers.

Since the invention of the inkjet, color printing has become immensely popular. Research in inkjet technology is making continual advances, with each new product on the market showing improvements in performance, usability, and output quality. As the process of refinement continues, so the price of an inkjet printers continue to fall.

Inkjet printing, like laser printing, is a non-impact method this means that it tends to be much quieter than the "screaming" dot matrix printers popular in the 1980s.

Ink is emitted from nozzles as they pass over the paper. Liquid ink in various colours being squirted at the paper to build up an image. A print head scans the page in horizontal strips, using a motor assembly to move it from left to right and back, as another motor assembly rolls the paper in vertical steps. A strip of the image is printed, then the paper moves on, ready for the next strip. This printing method is why sometimes on cheaper models you get color banding where the ink doesn't get evenly applied as the paper moves beneath the print head.

There are several types of inkjet technology but the most common is "drop on demand" (DOD). This works by squirting small droplets of ink onto paper, through tiny nozzles: like turning a hose pipe on and off 5,000 times a second. The amount of ink propelled onto the page is determined by the driver software that dictates which nozzles shoot droplets, and when.

This is why you sometimes get the droplet size listed in a printers specification. The smaller the drop size the finer control the drivers can have over the printed image. Coated paper helps by preventing the ink from blurring by soaking into the paper and spreading. Effectively increasing the drop size in a way that cannot be compensated for fully by the software management.

The nozzles used in inkjet printers are hair fine and on early models they became easily clogged. On modern inkjet printers this is rarely a problem, but changing cartridges can still be messy on some machines.

Another problem with inkjet technology is a tendency for the ink to smudge immediately after printing, but this, too, has improved drastically during the past few years with the development of new ink compositions. The other problem with photo printing is that the ink is much more susceptible to fading and is usually not water resistant. This makes home printed photos much more delicate than professionally printed photos.

Inkjets are for low volume printing

This really is the most important fact about inkjet technology. Although high volume inkjet's exist and this area is generally improving you have to consider that laser printers have also been improving and the gap between the running costs of both inkjet's and laser printers is still as wide as it ever was.

Having said that running costs are not the be all and end all of home printer usage. Great looking photo printers are so cheap now that combined with a digital camera iindependentphotography is a reality thanks to the aadvancementsin inkjet printer technology.