Inkjet printers, which could be categorized as ink dispersion
printers, are relatively inexpensive technologies,
especially when you compare them to laser printers, which
are much more complex and tend to be more expensive.
Inkjet printers are also very quiet when
they're printing, which make them a good choice for almost
any working environment.
Inkjet printers can also print in very high resolutions,
and also in color, so you can make some very nice-looking
documents or photographs.
One of the disadvantages of Inkjet printers
is the cost of the ink.
Although it's relatively inexpensive
to purchase the printer, the ongoing cost of ink
tends to be relatively expensive in comparison.
This ink is also not permanent.
It tends to fade over time.
So if you're printing out something
that needs to be kept permanently
over a number of years, an Inkjet printer
may not be the best solution.
And because this printer ink tends to clog very easily,
you'll find that many printers will run an automated cleaning
process every day just to make sure the printer remains
operable.
Here's a picture of these Inkjet cartridges
inside of an Inkjet printer.
You can see there's ink inside each one of these,
and the ink cartridge is going to put a drop of this ink
onto the page as needed.
And you'll notice there are only four different colors
in this particular group.
There is a cyan, a magenta, a yellow, and a black.
You'll sometimes hear this referred to as a CMYK.
The K stands for the key color, which
is usually the black color.
We're obviously printing documents
that use more than just these four colors,
so your printer combines these colors together
to give you exactly the right color on the page.
In many of the Inkjet cartridges that we
use in our home and our office, you'll
find that the Inkjet cartridge and the printheads
are integrated into the same component.
That means that if you change out the cartridge,
you're effectively also changing out the printhead.
On larger, more commercial Inkjet printers,
you may find that the ink itself and the printhead are separated
from each other so that you can change them out individually.
Here's a close-up of this printhead
on this print cartridge.
The printer's talking directly to this printhead
through the connectors that are on the side,
and then the ink is dispersed out
of these small openings that are in the printhead itself.
Inkjet printers commonly use feed rollers
to be able to pull paper through the printer as it's printing.
You commonly see feed rollers, also, on laser printers.
And it's important to keep these feed rollers clean
and make sure they're not worn so
that they're able to pull the paper through properly.
If you do have a printer that prints
on both sides of the page, there's
probably some additional hardware
in the printer that allows for duplexing.
This means that the printer will print on one side of the paper,
there will be hardware to flip the page over,
and then it will print on the other side of the paper.
Here's a closer look at these feed rollers.
They're responsible for pulling that paper all the way through.
So if you find that the paper's not feeding properly
or it's not being pulled all the way through the system evenly,
you may have worn feed rollers that need to be replaced.
During the printing process, all of those ink cartridges
with their print heads are going to be placed inside
of a carriage.
This carriage is responsible for moving back and forth
across the page, putting the drops of ink along the page
as it goes.
There's usually also a belt that is pulling this carriage back
and forth.
So those are the two moving components
that you'll often need to troubleshoot on a printer.
You'll need to make sure that the carriage is
able to move back and forth across the page,
and that the belt itself is able to pull
all the way across the page and send it back to the other side.
Here's a view of the carriage and the belt
as we're looking from above into the printer.
All the ink cartridges sit inside of this carriage,
and you can see the brown belt that's
here that's responsible for pulling
the carriage from one side of the printer to the other.
Because you have these multiple ink cartridges inside
of an Inkjet printer, there are times
when there may become misalignments
between the different colors.
And if that occurs, you may want to perform an Inkjet printer
calibration.
This calibration process will print some test images
that will help you determine if all of the colors
are aligned properly, and will make sure
that all of the lines and other images
are sharp and crisp on the page.
There's usually a calibration option
that you can access by using the menus on the printer itself,
and it will print a page without having any type of system
connected to it or having to send a particular print
job to the printer.
You should be able to look at the alignment page,
make sure all of the lines look crisp,
and make sure that all of the colors
are lining up with each other and there's
no overlap between the different colors
as it's printing them on this alignment page.
You may have to look carefully to see that all of the colors
are printing properly and that there's
no misalignment of the colors as it's printing on the page.