The Mechanics of an Inkjet Printer

23 Nov The Mechanics of an Inkjet Printer

Image credit: Pixel Smith Studios

We’re all familiar with printers, whether we hire a printer or own one. But what we may not all be familiar with is just how these printers function.
There are many different kinds of printers for sale at DocX, such as standard office and home printers, and even much larger production printers, like printing presses and wide format printers.

In this article, we’re going to focus on how standard office inkjet printers work. When you purchase or hire printers, it is best to have experts on-hand to maintain them so that they perform optimally. However, it is still interesting to know just how your Xerox printer is outputting ink to create vibrant pictures on pieces of paper.

Inkjet printers all come with a reservoir that stores four colours of ink, and these stores are connected to several little nozzles that squirt the ink out onto the paper. These nozzles are known as the print head.

Furthermore, as you may know, inkjet printers can come in both black and white, and colour models. Most colour inkjet printers work on a CMYK colour system, which is able to make all of the colours of the rainbow. Your computer will communicate with your Xerox printer to let it know which pixels require which colours and combinations. The printer itself then tells the print heads how to produce a picture-perfect quality print. This is done with miniscule dots that, when combined, create the image you see on the paper.

Additionally, there are two cartridge types in inkjet printers available on the commercial market – heater and piezoelectric cartridges. Heater cartridges are used in thermal bubble or bubble jet printers and work with a heater that heats up the ink within the cartridge. This creates little ink bubbles that burst and are subsequently squirted onto the paper. Conversely, the piezoelectric cartridge works by applying an electric current to piezo crystals that are stored behind the reservoir. The current causes the crystals to vibrate and when they do, ink is squirted out of the nozzle.

If you’re looking to buy or hire a printer, you don’t need to know exactly how they work to know that, with Xerox and DocX, you’ll be getting superior machines that print quality with each page. Contact us today to purchase or hire a printer for your business.