Having our own inkjet printer in our homes was practically unimaginable thirty years back. The ones that were around then were expensive and clanky, and really weren't even a practical thing to have around the home. But today it's a different ball game. Printers have become very commonplace and are filling home offices around the globe.

If you're like most people, you don't understand just how inkjet printers or other printers even work. They really are a fascinating piece of technology, and a real testament to how advanced technology is in this area. It's a good idea if you own one of these fine machines, for you to learn what makes them tick, so you can avoid mistakes and save yourself money.

Here is the way that inkjet printing processes work. Basically, there are two type, one is the 'piezoelectric' and another one is 'thermal'. With the piezoelectric process, the pressure that gets created and used to push the ink droplets through the nozzles gets created by piezo crystals. These crystal are stimulated by electric charges and contract and expand. Their movements push the ink through the nozzles of the cartridge and draw out additional ink that is necessary for creating printouts.

With the thermal process your printer will generate heat so it can push the ink through the cartridge nozzles. Then bubbles are produced inside the cartridge from the heat, and they then get forced through the nozzles using pressure. Once the bubbles burst the ink makes contact with your printer. A vacuum is created from the bubbles bursting which draws more of the ink out of the cartridge, and then more heat is produced for creating more bubbles and the process continues.

The ink is processed this way. The method implemented for processing your printer ink is known as 'dithering'. In dithering, color pixels get broken down into small dots that are used to form a whole color spectrum. The 3 primary colors that get used to mix and make the others are the Magenta, the Cyan, and the Yellow.

Making a dot while printing takes a high degree of precision. The printout quality is determined mostly by how many dots per inch the inkjet printer is able to produce. This is known as the 'printer resolution'. The amount of layers of graduated color that the printer can produce per dot is part of the printer resolution formula as well. In theory, the more resolution your printer has, and the more graduations it can produce, the better quality of print it will have.

With color graduation and printer resolution, the inkjet printer is able to create printouts that feature millions of various colors. Some that even our human eyes can't recognize. Of course, this depends on what type of printer it is. The photo-centric printer will have a focus toward reproducing color, while the inkjet printers used for document printing place a higher emphasis on the printer resolution over the color graduation.

That's basically the nuts and bolts of how the inkjet printers and the printer inks work. The more you understand the inner workings of your machine, the better able you'll be to get the best results from it, as well as avoid harming any components of it.

About: Author writes on tech topics including hardware and softwares. Looking to buy best quality, generic and branded printer inks, like canon, epson and hp then you can find lots of information and articles on author's website itself.