How Inkjet Printers Work

Inkjet printers shoot extremely small droplets of ink -- thirty dots per millimeter or more -- onto paper to produce a picture. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about inkjet printers.

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Episode Transcript

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(00:28):
Hi'm Marshall Brain with today's question, how does an ink
jet printer work? An inkjet printer is any printer that
fires extremely small droplets of ink onto paper to create
an image. If you've ever looked at a piece of
paper that's come out of an inkjet printer, you know that,
first of all, the dots are incredibly small, thirty dots

(00:48):
per millimeter or more, and the dots are positioned very
precisely on the paper. Different types of inkjet printers form
their droplets of inc in different ways, but by far
the most popular technique is the bubble jet. In a
bubble jet printer, tiny resistors create heat, and this heat
vaporizes ink to create a bubble. In other words, the

(01:10):
ink is turning to steam and creating a bubble. In
the process. The expansion that creates the bubble, causes a
droplet deform, and then it dejects from the print head.
A typical bubble jet print head has sixty four or
eight tiny nozzles, and all of them can fire a
droplet simultaneously. This allows an inkjet printer to print on

(01:32):
an entire sheet of paper extremely quickly, even though the
dots are so small. For more on this and thousands
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