文档介绍：How Inkjet Printers Work
by Jeff Tyson
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 inexpensive color inkjet printer made by Hewlett Packard
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 e 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 bined 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.
First, let's take a quick look at the various printer technologies.
Impact vs. Non-impact
There are several major printer technologies available. These technologies can be broken down