Inkjet Printer

The next logical step in the printing world was the invention of inkjet printers. Inkjet printers were fast and produced exceptional quality images and texts at low costs. Inkjet printers bear a modest footprint, are light-weight and portable. It can print professional-looking images which makes it so popular among the graphic aficionados of this age. The only downside to using them is maintenance. One needs to print at least one page per week to keep the printer’s cartridges from getting atrophied and clogging the print head for the worse, unless of course he or she has plenty of spare time and is in dire need to brandish some ill-portent to smoke it out in the open! Regular cleaning jobs and head alignment would also not be out of one’s agenda if the printer is to lead a salubrious hitch-free life!

Working principle of device:

The printer consists of ink cartridge(s) that contain the print heads which in turn end in numerous nozzles also called jets, a stepper motor to move the print head and entry and exit rollers to move the paper through the printer. These printers can print virtually all kinds of graphics and fonts as they do not rely upon the striking of the pre-carved characters on the paper as was the case with type writers and daisy wheel printers (on a nostalgic note: characters were engraved on a wheel whose shape resembled that of a daisy flower and hence the name). The print drivers and the languages such PCL (Printer Command Language) or PS (post script) convert the digital data into signals that the printer can comprehend. These printers are not much different from dot matrix printers since these too spray miniscule drops of ink on the paper (instead of pins striking the paper which create the dots) which results into the formation of an image. Unlike its predecessor the quality doesn’t suffer even when the image consists of dots (drops of ink) as legions of them sit huddled together as though the frost has got the better of them! The ink is sprayed by two disparate mechanisms. Canon printers usually use heat to push the drops of ink out and onto the paper while Epson printers use Piezoelectricity (electricity used to create pressure that pushes the ink out of the nozzle). The stepper motors move the print head across the paper from the left to the right and back. The entry and exit rollers account for the vertical motion of the paper inside the printer. Many printers use gravity feed mechanism where papers are loaded from above the printer.

Device installation: The printers can be connected via the Parallel/Serial/USB/Ethernet port or Wi-Fi. Appropriate drivers for the operating system used must be installed before the printer is ready to blow all of its pristine bells and whistles!

Manufacturer of device, its models and prices:

1.      HP - Hp Deskjet 2132 Allinone Print Scan Copy (Rs. 3,499), HP® Officejet Pro 6830 e-All-in-One Printer (Rs. 11,500), HP 2520hc Color Inkjet Printer (Rs. 6,982)

2.      Epson – Epson M100 Monochorome Inkjet Printer (Rs. 8,940), Epson L220 Colour Ink Tank System Printer (Rs. 9,499), Epson L365 Color WiFi Inkjet Printer (Rs. 14,999) etc

3.      Canon – Canon Pixma Mg2570s Printer Print Scan Copy (Rs. 3,399), Canon Pixma Ink Tank G3000 Aio Multifunction Printer (Rs. 13,499), Canon Pixma G 2000 Aio Multifunction Inkjet Printer (Rs. 10,199) etc

Standard Configuration of device: They come in two variants; 1) black and white printers and 2) color printers. Color printers can have only one cartridge in simple models or it could have multiple cartridges each of one color (CMYK – cyan, magenta, yellow and black). They can produce images having a density of at least 300 dpi (dots per inch). However, certain models can reach up to the cutting-edge 1200 dpi mark too! They can have an NIC (network interface card) built into it thereby facilitating it to connect directly to the wired/wireless network. In case of network printers, the printer itself acts as a print server. If the printer lacks the ability to act as a print server, an external hardware print server can be connected to the printer. Optional accessories include Hard Drives and small amount of the DIMM (Dual In-Line Memory Module) DDR-X (Double Data Rate, where X is the version of DDR) RAM (Random Access Memory) chips. These are desired as they reduce the load on the host and increase the speed of processing the print job. Now-a-days multifunction devices are the trend du jour! People want fast, efficient, compact and reliable devices that they can lug around without any difficulties. These nifty features can manifest themselves only if a multipurpose device is created to serve the insatiable desires of the ever-demanding customers! The elite technicians reparteed with just such an instrument that would blow their user’s minds away into marvel! Thus were born multifunction printers that can print, photocopy and fax all from the same device! It is said that necessity is the mother of invention. The need for comfort paved the path for the introduction of devices such as feeders, collaters and duplexers. These add-ons can store bunches of various kinds of sheets, can collect, arrange and staple the print jobs and can print on the obverse and the reverse without the need of human intervention respectively. Of course our good old uncle Sammy has better to do than to sift through the mounds of pages that can make his age go dizzy, thanks to the collaters! 

Cost: As a rule of thumb color printers are costlier than black and white printers and network printers are pricier than their stand-alone counterparts. Average home-use printers can be bought for about Rs. 4,000 while one needs to invest at least Rs. 15,000 in professional printers.

Market share of different models (Standard companies only):

l  HP

l  Epson

l  Canon