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How Inkjet Printers Work
  • Impact vs. Non-impact
  • Inside an Inkjet Printer
  • Heat vs. Vibration
  • Paper and Ink
  • Refilling Cartridges


    • How Laser Printers Work
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    How Inkjet Printers Work

    No matter where you are reading this article from, you most likely have a printer nearby. And there's a very good chance that it is an inkjet printer. Since their introduction in the latter half of the 1980s, inkjet printers have grown in popularity and performance while dropping significantly in price.



    An inkjet printer is any printer that places extremely small droplets of ink onto paper to create an image. If you ever look at a piece of paper that has come out of an inkjet printer, you know that: The dots are extremely small (usually between 50 and 60 microns in diameter), so small that they are tinier than the diameter of a human hair (70 microns)! The dots are positioned very precisely, with resolutions of up to 1440x720 dots per inch (dpi). The dots can have different colors combined together to create photo-quality images. In this edition of HowStuffWorks, you will learn about the various parts of an inkjet printer and how these parts work together to create an image. You will also learn about the ink cartridges and the special paper some inkjet printers use.

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