printer ink?
siteWhy Print Cartridges Are Necessary For Superior Print Quality
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010The chief difficulty in printing sharp-edged monochrome type is the same as for printing four-color photo images; namely, the problem of getting the right amount of printer ink on the paper in the right place. A printer that puts too much ink on the page will get muddy edges and muddy colors. A printer that puts too little ink on the page will get indistinct letters and ethereal, unsaturated pastels. How long it takes to get the ink on the page is another consideration, as are drying time and the thickness or viscosity of the ink. It’s a juggling act, and the invention that solved the conundrum was printer ink cartridges.
Back in the days of dot-matrix printers, a “daisywheel” was struck by pistons that printed corresponding dots on the printed page by pushing ink off a ribbon. Letters and numbers were made up entirely of dots, printed in patterns, and of one color only-black. Images were pretty much unknown output. And print time was constrained to the limits of the transfer mechanics of the printer. Although continuous inkjet printers have been around since the sixties, it was Siemen’s invention of the drop on demand technology that opened up inkjet capabilities. Instead of a continuous flow of ink that was guided onto or away from the paper, the drop on demand pushed a minute quantity of ink onto the paper by the action of a peizo-electric crystal flexing in response to a current (Hewlett Packard developed bubble jet technology independently). Now the problem of getting the right amount of ink out was solved. The solution of the problem of where to put it followed soon after.
The hurdle was that such a minute amount of ink was needed at a time. If a certain color of ink had to be deposited on the paper, and a different color right after, the second color couldn’t be routed to the spray nozzle fast enough. If the first ink was allowed to dry in the nozzle, it was the end of the story. Any residual ink left in the nozzle could clog it, so the nozzle had to be kept moist with fresh ink of the same color. Enter printer cartridges. Not only does each cartridge contain a supply of an individual ink, there are active electronics in every cartridge that the printer communicates with and that control the printing process, telling the cartridge how much ink to release, and just when. Since color printing relies on exact juxtaposition of solid color dots, this meant beautiful color prints could be easily produced. So each ink needs its own cartridge, or else there’d be complete communication breakdown. And that would mean inferior prints.
