How the printer works. How a laser printer works. Interaction of ink with paper.
10 April 2013
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Inkjet printers are intermediate between dot matrix and laser printers in terms of price, speed and print quality. Most often they are used for printing color photographs and images.
The main structural elements of an inkjet printer are the print head, cartridges, CISS, paper feed mechanism, motors, sensors, control panel, interface connectors and housing.
Structure and principle of operation
The fuser unit is a heated roller that fuses the toner particles onto the page as it passes. This seals the toner on the page so it's no longer in powder form and makes sure the toner doesn't get smudged when it comes out of the printer.
Printers of other technologies
Was our "How Laser Printers Work" guide easy to follow? We rock the anodizing machine, picking up paper jams and ink levels, and yet, after reloading the sheets and replacing the blue cartridge, the stubborn piece of the machine refuses to fulfill its orders.
Printhead
An important role in the operation of an inkjet printer is played by the print head, which through microscopic holes (nozzles) sprays tiny droplets of ink onto the surface of the media. The very first inkjet printers had 12 nozzles each, in the latest cutting-edge printers the number of nozzles reaches several tens of thousands, and the diameter of such nozzles is much smaller than the diameter of a needle or even a human hair.
You and your printer just don't step in
How can a smartphone do 20 things we never knew we had to do, and a printer can't do the job it called for without turning us into angry, screaming, stabbed, hair-pulling wrecks? If you're feeling bad about your printer, it might be because you've taken the wrong house. I have had a bad relationship with the printer for years.
How a laser printer prints
The ink isn't that bad, it's just not true for many of us. If you're turning your digital photos into paper memories, ink is the ticket. But if you go for months without printing anything and then demand a 60 page report, your printer won't work.
Ink jet printer nozzle under a microscope
Inkjet printer manufacturers independently determine the number of nozzles in the print head, their size and location. For example, Lexmark uses a staggered arrangement of small and large nozzles, Canon prefers to equip its printers with many nozzles with a small diameter.
Problem: If you don't use enough ink, it can dry out. The print head has all these tiny nozzles that you have to keep wet or they will clog, resulting in no dots on the page, Team Brother explained. Once every couple of days, most ink jets will go through a cleaning cycle to keep the printheads clean and damp, so the inkjet paper will use a small amount of ink when sitting idol. So if you're an infrequent customer, the printer can easily eject all of its ink between the time a new cartridge is installed and when you finally bypass it.
The print head can be built into the cartridge, or it can be located separately from the ink tank. To increase the speed of inkjet printers, modern manufacturers upgrade printheads by combining them into modules. This allows you to achieve a significant increase in print speed.
The following figure shows a printhead manufactured by HP using HP Edgeline technology.
How to type without trying to gouge out your eyes. Select best printer for your needs. Lasers for black and white printing, ink jets for photographs. For example, jet printer in a woodshop picks up dust when the ink dries - not very good. And laser printers require air to cool their motors, so keep them on bookshelves. Some printer models prefer certain types paper. Better not go outside. Do not rely on factory settings. When printing on thick card stock or special photo paper, press the menu to set.
HP Printhead with HP Edgeline Technology
During printing, such a head remains stationary, and the paper slides past it, taking ink onto its surface. There are five groups of nozzles (2112 in each) in the head housing, each head applies ink of two colors to the paper. There are 5280 nozzles for each color.
If your printer will be used by more than one person, choose something wireless. Laser printers use toner, which is a powder, not ink. The powder is applied to the paper on demand and then pressed through two 300 degree rollers that melt into the page. Toner doesn't mind if you leave it unattended for long periods of time and it has a faster print speed than ink.
Text with toner tends to appear on the page as "a crisper, darker black," brother explains, and it lasts longer, making laser printing better for long-term document storage. The catch is that laser printers are more expensive.
Ink Drop Ejection Methods
Inkjet printers use two methods for ejecting ink droplets: piezoelectric and thermal inkjet.
A flat piezoelectric membrane is built into each nozzle of a printer with piezoelectric printing technology, which, under the action of an electrical impulse, flexes, pushing it out of the nozzle ink drop. After that, the electrical impulse disappears, and a new portion of ink enters the nozzle from the cartridge.
Paper, it turns out, is a pain in the ass. If a printer only had to deal with one type of paper, its rollers and springs could be fine-tuned to apply the perfect amount of pressure to get that variety through the system without a hitch. But instead, printer trays are filled with varying paper thicknesses, base materials, and coatings that can get in the way of the machine. For example, stock used for photos is slippery and sticky, which can cause it to stick to rubber rollers.
And some types of recycled papers can shed some of the paper dander that builds up on the rollers and prevents them from working properly. However, printers are expected to use them reliably. The weather also depends on the weather. Too much moisture and the pages didn't want to come off. But the opposite is also not good. When it's too dry, static electricity builds up. It also causes sheets of paper to cling.
Each nozzle of the printer with gas bubble technology has a microscopic heater that heats the ink to boiling point very quickly. The resulting steam pushes a drop of ink out of the nozzle. After that, the heater turns off, the ink cools down, and a new portion of ink enters the nozzle from the cartridge.
Printer manufacturers deal with this in several ways. They also have different print settings for thick paper, photo paper, and pages that are more contrived. Also, no big innovation will change the way the printer works, what it does. It's also by grace Operating Systems to which it connects and the paper it feeds.
Big changes had to cover several industries. The better you learn to use the printer, the better it will work for you. However, monitors and printers differ in how this is achieved, as monitors are light sources while print output is reflective. Monitors mix light from phosphors through the primary colors of additives: red, green, and blue, while printers use inks from primary subtractive colors: cyan, magenta, and yellow.
Ink
Ink is a consumable for inkjet printers. By their nature, they are a coloring liquid that is sprayed onto the surface of the paper during printing. The composition of the ink includes water, dyes, solvents, wetting agents, regulators, stabilizers and other chemicals that ensure the stability of their fraction. One cubic millimeter contains approximately 10,000 ink drops emitted from the nozzle of an inkjet printer.
In both cases, the primary primary colors fade to form the entire spectrum. The reproduction of a color viewed on a monitor to exactly match the output of a printer is known as color matching. Colors vary from monitor to monitor, and the colors on the printed page do not always match exactly what is displayed on the screen. The color generated on the printed page depends on the color system used and the specific printer model, not the colors shown on the monitor.
Modern inkjet printers are capable of printing in color and black, but how you switch between the two modes depends on their capabilities. Four-color printers - cyan, yellow, magenta and black - can seamlessly switch between black and color images on the same page. Printers equipped with only three colors cannot.
Ink
Modern inkjet printers form images from millions of microscopic droplets, so they are of very high quality. If you look at such an image under a microscope, you can see tiny raised ink dots on the surface of the paper.
Many of the cheaper inkjet models only have room for one cartridge. This significantly affects the operation of the printer. Every time you want to change from black and white to color, you must physically change the cartridges. When you use black on a color page, it will be made up of three colors, resulting in an unsatisfactory dark green or gray color, commonly referred to as composite black.
The two main criteria for color print quality are resolution, measured in dots per inch, and the number of levels or gradations that can be printed per dot. Generally, the higher the resolution and the more levels per dot, the better the overall print quality.
Drops of ink on paper under a microscope
It is worth mentioning that the ink can be water-soluble and pigmented. The former penetrate into the deep layers of the paper, while the latter are fixed on its surface. Pigmented inks provide more high quality printing, but inferior in terms of durability of finished documents.
In practice, most printers make a compromise between choosing a higher resolution and providing more levels per dot. This is often determined by the purpose of the printer. For example, graphics professionals are interested in maximizing the number of levels per dot to provide a higher "photographic" image quality, while general business users will need enough a high resolution to Provide good quality text and reasonable image quality.
The simplest type of color printer is a binary device in which cyan, magenta, yellow, and black dots are "on" or "off", with no levels in between. Obviously, this is not a sufficient palette for high-quality color printing, so there are halftones.
Most inkjet printers use a four-color CMYK layout that includes magenta, cyan, yellow, and black inks. In an effort to make photo printing more realistic, developers are constantly supplementing the CMYK layout with new colors. In some printers, you can find pale cyan, pale pink, pale gray ink, as well as orange and green ink.
Halftone algorithms divide the printer's self-tuning resolution into a grid of halftone cells and then include varying numbers of dots in those cells to simulate variable dot size. With continuous tone printing, there is an unlimited palette of solid colors. In practice, "unlimited" means 7 million colors, which is more than the human eye can distinguish. To do this, the printer must be able to create and overlay 256 shades per dot per color, which obviously requires fine control over the creation and placement of dots.
Cartridge
The cartridge is one of the most important structural elements an inkjet printer, which consists of an ink tank, a contact plate, and in some cases a printhead and a chip.
Cartridges for inkjet printers can be combined or separate. Separate cartridges use only one color of ink, combined cartridges are divided into three compartments for magenta, cyan and yellow ink. The separate cartridge system is used in older generation printers with multi-color layout, the combined cartridge system is more common in printers younger generation designed for small print volumes.
Continuous tone printing is mainly the domain of dye sublimation printers. However, all major printing technologies can produce multiple shades per dot, allowing them to deliver richer palettes of solid colors and smoother halftones. Such devices are called "conneon" printers.
Six-color inkjet printers are now on the market specifically designed to deliver photographic quality. These devices add two extra inks - light cyan and light magenta - to compensate for the current inkjet technology's inability to produce very tiny dots. Smaller drop sizes will also reduce the half tone required, as a wider range of tiny droplets can combine to create a wider palette of solid colors.
Combined cartridge printing system
Single cartridge printing system
When using combined cartridges, after the end of any one color of ink, you have to throw away the entire cartridge, even if there is a sufficient amount of ink liquid in the remaining tanks. Therefore, in recent times Inkjet printers are increasingly using separate cartridge systems.
The human eye can distinguish about a million colors; exact number depending on the individual observer and viewing conditions. Hue refers to a primary color in terms of one or two dominant primary colors. It is measured as a position on a standard color wheel and is described as an angle between 0 and 360 degrees. It is measured from 0 to 100 percent: at 0% the color will have no tint and be gray, at 100% the color is fully saturated. Brightness refers to the proximity of colors to white or black, which is a function of the amplitude of the light that stimulates the eye's receptors. It is also measured as a percentage: if any hue is at 0% brightness, it becomes black, at 100% it becomes completely light. When printed, the pigments in the ink absorb light selectively so that only portions of the spectrum are reflected back to the viewer's eye, hence the term subtractive color.
To reduce the cost of prints, some office and commercial printers use continuous ink supply systems, or CISS for short, consisting of ink tanks and flexible tubes that carry ink to the print head.
Continuous Ink Supply System
Installing a continuous ink supply system on the printer, as a rule, does not cause problems even for untrained users. The CISS package includes all necessary materials and tools as well detailed diagram with pictures. Capsules or CISS cartridges installed instead of the original print cassettes, the capillary loop is laid inside the printer using the stickers and clips included in the kit. Capsules and containers are filled with ink, several head cleaning cycles are started, and the device is ready for use.
Printer with CISS
CISS can significantly reduce the cost of purchasing cartridges, but such systems are especially relevant for large volumes of color printing. In this case, the cost of one print is comparable to the cost of a print made on a laser printer.
Paper feed mechanism
Paper can be loaded into the printer vertically or horizontally. Vertical loading is made from open trays located at the top of the printer, while the orientation of the sheet during loading can be either portrait or landscape. Horizontal loading is from trays that are accessible from the front of the machine.
After receiving the job, the printer grabs the top sheet of paper and feeds it into the print path. A sheet of paper moves along the printing path thanks to a special mechanism, which is based on a roller with a rubberized surface, driven by a stepper motor. The paper is pressed against the roller by additional rollers with a rubberized surface.
Some printers use duplex printing devices that allow you to print automatically on two sides of the paper at once.
Motor
Four small motors play an important role in inkjet printers. The first motor drives the roller that grabs the paper and pushes it into the printing mechanism, the second drives the automatic paper feeder, the third drives the print head along the media, and the fourth is responsible for pushing the ink out of the nozzles. Thanks to these four motors, the structural parts of the printer work as a whole.
Sensors
The printer has "sense organs", the role of which is performed by mechanical and optical sensors. An optocoupler (LED and photodiode) determines the moment when a sheet of paper enters the printing path. Encoder sensors signal to the printer about the position of the print head in relation to the sheet of paper. The PW sensor detects the size of the paper that has entered the printer. A sensor in the printer's power circuit indicates that a foreign object, such as a jammed sheet, has entered the carriage movement area.
Interface connectors
LPT, USB and Ethernet interface connectors are used to connect the printer to a personal computer or laptop. The LTP parallel port is used in older PC models, it has now been replaced by USB and Ethernet interfaces. Adapters are available for users that allow you to connect printers with an LPT interface to USB slots.
In most cases, interface connectors are located on the back panel of inkjet printers or on the side panels, closer to the rear wall.
Control Panel
To control the operation of the printer, use the control panel with function buttons and indicators. Some printers do not have control panels, and their settings are made using a computer.
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| Epson SureColor SC T-Series | Epson B-500DN |
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| Epson Stylus SX125 | Epson Stylus Photo R300 |
Frame
The printer is "dressed" in a plastic case, which reliably protects the working mechanism from damage and dust particles. Most often, the printer body is designed in a neutral color scheme: gray, white, silver, black. It can have a single color or a combination of colors.
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| HP Deskjet 3940 Printer
in white and gray body |
HP Photosmart 7960 Printer
in a silver case |
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| Canon Pixma iP3600 in black glossy case | Epson Stylus SX535WD in black matte case |
The plastic from which the printer body is made can be matte or glossy. Matte plastic is less whimsical in maintenance, it is easy to care for it, a damp cloth does not leave streaks on its surface. Glossy plastic looks more attractive and presentable, but fingerprints and dust marks are visible on it, and a damp cloth leaves stains on its surface.
The central part of an inkjet printer is occupied by a printing path along which paper is pulled during printing. To the right of it is usually located the parking place for the heads, and to the left - the drive elements. The layout of structural elements in the printer case is quite dense, and there is almost no free space left.
10 April 2013
In contact with
We constantly print all kinds of documents at work or at home - from photos to texts. We simply send the document for printing, and then we take it from the printer. Have you ever wondered how all kinds of printers put images and texts on paper? Inkjet, laser, matrix devices - they all work differently, each has its pros and cons. Let's take a look at different printing technologies.
Core Technology Exotic for Originals
The pile is small
Is it so difficult to understand how to print? Are there many? In fact, there are only two main ones, that is, those that are used everywhere and continuously: office and home. Scared of gradation? Then let's denote it more formally: office - in 99 percent of cases it turns out to be laser printing, home - inkjet. Of course, there are exceptions, we will talk about them in more detail when describing each printing method.
Why do we need to know all this? The fact is that we are used to choosing printers according to our habits - “I have had an N inkjet machine all my life, so I will buy the same one, only fresher.” Agree, this approach to the choice of equipment is not always logical - the printer is not a refrigerator, it is much more complicated, and different models different.
Core Printing Technologies
| Name | Main advantages | Main cons | Scope of application |
| laser | High print speed, good quality, low cost per print | Harmful to health, the printers themselves are quite expensive | office printing |
| LED | Harmless technology, very low cost of prints and printers themselves, high speed color printing | Print quality is slightly worse than laser printers, lower black and white print speed | Office and home printing |
| Inkjet | Very high quality color printouts (photos), low printer cost | Slow printing speed, high cost of consumables | Home printing, design activities |
| matrix | Very low cost per print, low maintenance | High price of printers high level noise during printing | Specialized Application |
| solid ink | Very low cost per print, impeccable print quality | Very high price of printers | Office printing in design studios |
| sublimation | Excellent photo quality, easy to use | Unable to print text documents | Home and office photo printing |
In order not to get lost in the forest of terms and concepts related to printing technologies, let's look at each of them in order. Let's start, of course, with the most popular - laser.
A ray of light
The oldest of all technologies, it is she who is the basis of all copiers - laser printing. Thanks to its existence, all office workers can print a text document (sometimes even color) of excellent quality in a few seconds.
Laser printers print very quickly and clearly, which is why they are loved in offices.
Look at the printer that you have in your office - most likely, it is a good example of this section of our collection. A fairly large gray box that spits out finished printouts at a fairly high speed, almost without thinking. What does he have inside? Why does it print so quickly and with high quality?
Inside such an apparatus there is a drum, on which an electric charge is induced, corresponding to the output print. This charge attracts toner - a special powder (black, or color, depending on the type of printer). Then this powder is transferred to a sheet of paper (or to some intermediate carrier, and only then to paper). So that the picture does not crumble, the sheet passes through the oven - a special heater that bakes the toner on paper. Because of it, an unpleasant smell appears during long printing. However, not only the stove "spoils the atmosphere" - laser printers emit harmful ozone gas during their work.
Scheme of work laser printer
Well, the main negative traits(bad smell and ozone emission) of laser printers we remembered. Let's add to them the high cost of the devices themselves - that's all the disadvantages of such a solution. The undoubted advantages of laser printing include very high quality and speed of printing.
LED printers are the ideal choice for home text printing
LED printers are analogous to laser printers. They actually work in the same way, only instead of a laser, a row of LEDs is used to form an image on the drum. The method has only one drawback - the print quality is slightly inferior to laser. The print speed here depends on the number of colors: black and white printers work a little slower than laser counterparts, but color LED printing is faster. In all other respects, LED printers have gone far ahead - they cost little, their consumables are also cheaper (although laser toners are also low), and most importantly, they are considered less harmful to health than laser ones.
in the jet
The exact opposite of laser printing is inkjet printing. As a rule, this is a slow application of a high-quality color image to paper, and not at all a lightning-fast printout of black text. Let's look at such a printer from the inside.
The inside of the inkjet printer is very loose.
Obviously, the device of such an apparatus is much simpler than that of a laser one. There is no drum, no lasers, no stove. Only a lone cartridge (or several) dangles inside an almost empty case. So, just two main elements in an inkjet printer are the cartridge and the print head. By the way, some manufacturers have cartridges equipped with a built-in print head. Why is this necessary?
Mankind has invented several inkjet technologies. Depending on your needs, one or another printing technology will be more suitable. There is a thermal jet and piezoelectric technology.
Diagram of the operation of a piezoelectric inkjet printer
Thermal inkjet technology involves the use of cheap printheads. This is done in order to be able to change them as soon as necessary. Printer manufacturers are divided on how often the print head should be changed - someone thinks only in the event of a global blockage, and someone - every time you change the cartridge.
The technology itself is based on the fact that in order to apply a picture or text on paper, the ink is heated sharply, and they, expanding, fly outward, imprinting treasured dots on the paper. A cheap print head is needed here precisely in order to ensure the user's peace of mind - what if the ink dries tightly in the nozzles of the head before it comes out?
The scheme of operation of a thermal inkjet printer
The founders of piezoelectric technology claim that their printheads literally last forever and do not need to be replaced. If this is true, you will know when the printer refuses to print just one or two dots. However, the nozzles can be cleaned - either with the help of a driver and a large number fresh branded ink, or with the help of a service center.
Why such sacrifices? Firstly, the cartridge, which is only an ink bottle in literally this word is worth quite a bit. And this certainly pleases all users. Secondly, the technology really allows you to put clear microscopic dots on paper: at the inception stage, this printing method was really the best (in fairness, it’s fair to say that now both technologies are doing their job perfectly).
 Usually, an inkjet printer has two cartridges - black and color. |
So, we figured out the print heads. And what is ink? Certainly not the colored water that fountain pens fill. By modern standards, the ink of any printer must meet at least two conditions - to be moisture and light resistant, in addition, it is desirable that microscopic drops can be formed from them.
Currently, the size of a drop in some printers does not exceed one picoliter (in terms of thickness, this value can be equated to one tenth of the thickness of a human hair, that is, about 1/100 mm). It is worth noting that not all companies make the main bet on the size of the drop. For example, some manufacturers (for example, HP) are trying to improve quality through better color mixing, rather than reducing the size of inaccurate droplets. Generally speaking, minimum dimensions ink drops range from 1-1.5 (for Canon and Epson) to 4-5 (for Lexmark and HP) picoliters.
In general, ink is divided into two groups - pigment and water-soluble. It is believed that water-soluble ink conveys the colors of pictures and photographs better, although at present both options deserve very warm words. Pigment inks are waterproof, although water-soluble inks (if not soaked in water) are sometimes very strong.
print version
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