Inkjet Printers

An inkjet printer places extremely small droplets of ink onto paper to create an image. There are various ways of placing the droplets onto paper so there are two main inkjet technologies currently used by printer manufacturers.

Bubble jet - tiny resistors create heat, and this heat vaporizes ink to create a bubble. The expansion that creates the bubble causes a droplet to form and eject from the print head. A typical bubble jet print head has 64 or 128 tiny nozzles, and all of them can fire a droplet simultaneously.

Piezo crystals - instead of heating like bubble jet printers. Piezo crystals control tiny pumps which can fire ink droplets at the paper with high speed and great accuracy. The shape, size and sharpness of each dot can be determined with great accuracy – some models can produce up to 6 different droplet sizes.

Inkjet printers are great for home use, because they can print in color, you're able to print out digital photos or graphics. Inkjet printers are perfect for general printing needs, you get great color for most images and solid text on top of standard black and white printing. Inkjet printers are also very affordable and that comes with a catch.

Manufacturers are selling inkjet printers at almost insanely low prices and are not only not making any money on certain models they're loosing money on some. Reason they're doing this is that they focus on the future costs associated with your inkjet printer. Ink Cartirdges are what manufacturers make money of and they're pretty expensive.

The downside to inkjet printers are the high printing costs per page. Inkjet printing cost depends on how much ink you use and depending on how much you print but they can add up very quickly. A tip before buying an inkjet printer is to think of the ink tank configuration. It's better to buy a printer that isn't having all the color tanks with ink combined. It's a smart and economical suggestion to buy inkjet printers with separate tanks for each color so you don't have te replace the entire cartridge just because you're out of black color as can easily happen if you print a lot of text documents.

Inkjet cartridges also vary in price and usually you can only use cartridges from the same manufacturer as your printer. That's how they make money after all. Recently an entire industry has emerged and that's the ink refilling industry. Because of the high costs involved with buying new cartridges you can buy ink and refill them yourself. That's a great way of saving money.