| | | | Refers to a type of printer or the mechanism of operation of a type of printer, in which small droplets of ink are sprayed through nozzles onto the paper surface. Ink is directed/propelled to produce the characters or images on the media either by the explosion of a bubble of steam in the ink stream (cheaper models) or by magnetic fields generated in the path of the expelled droplets (commercial models). Until recently, it was always the case that the inkjet printer's more expensive cousin, the laser printer, was capable of producing sharper images and of producing them at higher speed. Now though, the line has blurred and modern inkjet printers can produce very high resolution, high quality images at laser printer speeds. In addition, inkjet printers are usually much cheaper and have a smaller desktop footprint than a similar laser printer. They can be subdivided into : Thermal Inkjets (the typical consumer inkjet), Piezoelectric Inkjets (most commercial/industrial models) and Continuous Inkjets (used commercially for coding products and packages). Inks are stored in cartridges and need to be replaced every few hundred to every few thousand pages. Lower end inkjet printers typcially use a black cartridge and single colour cartridge that holds three colour inks in one - cyan, magenta and yellow. Business quality inkjets are more likely to have a separate cartridge for each colour and separate print heads that can be replaced individually, due to the higher service demands. The most appealing aspect of the inkjet printer is it's cost - many are given away by retailers as part of a home PC package. Some users are often then surprised by the relatively high cost of replacement cartridges that they need to buy, although there are plenty of high quality third party options to choose from and it is even possible to refill empty cartridges with bulk ink. | | | |
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