How does a bubble jet printer work?

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Each weekday Marshall Brain answers questions submitted by the readers of How Stuff Works in the Question of the Day section of HSW. You can also view previously answered questions in the HSW Question Archive. Here is today's question!

Question

How does a bubble jet printer work?

Answer

An ink jet printer is any printer that fires extremely small droplets of ink onto paper to create an image. If you ever look at a piece of paper that has come out of an ink jet printer, you know that:

The dots are extremely small(between 10 and 30 dots per millimeter)
The dots are positioned very precisely
In color printers, the dots can have multiple colors

Ink jet printers are fairly inexpensive - less expensive than laser printers, and much less expensive than color laser printers.

Different types of ink jet printers form their droplets of ink in different ways. There are several technologies used by printer manufacturers, 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. The expansion that creates the bubble causes a droplet to form and eject from the print head. A typical bubble jet print head has 64 or 128 tiny nozzles, and all of them can fire a droplet simultaneously.

Here are several interesting links:

Patent 4,532,530: Bubble jet printing device - great background description starting on page 7
Color printer head technology
Extend the life of Ink/Bubble Jet cartridges
Patent 4,849,774: Bubble jet recording apparatus
Patent 5,646,660: Printer ink cartridge with drive logic integrated circuit - an important HP patent

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