The Inkjet Conspiracy - How ink is deliberately wasted
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First, let's cover the basics of how an inkjet works. An inkjet printer uses a print head with hundreds of tiny nozzles in it, each nozzle capable of creating a tiny (~60 micron) dot of ink on the paper being printed upon. There are several technologies for accomplishing this such as thermal bubble and piezoelectric, but the effect is the same-for every nozzle commanded to jet, a tiny dot is created, and with resolutions up to 1024 dots per inch, the macro effect is a smooth, homogeneous image. Some printers have the print head built into the ink cartridge (HP was sued over this "innovation" in 2001), while others have a separate print head. One advantage of the former is you get a new print head every time you replace the ink cartridge, though you do so at a price.
If you ever take it in your mind to open up an inkjet printer, you'll find in bottom of the case a long white (at least, it was originally white) pad made of a synthetic material designed to soak up and trap liquids such as inkjet ink. Depending on the age of the printer, you might find the pad pretty full of ink already.
Every time you turn your printer on, it goes through a cleaning cycle. That is because ink can and does dry in the microscopic nozzles of the print head. So the printer cleans the head by squirting ink through it to clear any clogs and wipes the ink away. The discarded ink eventually drips down into the pad at the bottom of the device. If you decide to perform a nozzle check, the printer will do a short cleaning cycle before printing the test pattern. Note that the pattern is printed using one nozzle at a time, so any defects will be noted by the user. The manual nozzle cleaning utility runs the cleaning cycle several times in a row.
Many printers will also run a cleaning cycle after the printer has been dormant for a certain amount of time prior to printing any pages. When replacing a cartridge, the printer does a cleaning cycle to prime the new cartridge. Of course, all the cartridges are run during this process.
Now, the printer manufacturers can claim that they have the consumer's best interests in mind when they designed this frequent cleaning regimen-they want the printer to produce quality prints all of the time so the customer doesn't have to waste paper and ink trying to get it right, not to mention that problematic printers result in dissatisfaction, which results in loss of sales. While this is certainly true on the surface, it seems to me that if they were that concerned about conserving ink, they would have a separate reservoir of some form of cheap cleaning material (think: isopropyl alcohol) with which to flush and clean the heads, rather than expensive, specially formulated inks.
All-in-one color cartridges can be wasteful of ink if one has a tendency to print in one or two colors only-if blue runs out, the cartridge has to be replaced and the remaining yellow and red ink is wasted.
Then there is the aforementioned color/black ink issue-if a printer is set to print color (in most cases), then it will use color to make black when necessary. It will do so even if one is printing a simple black on white document.
Next: Smart cartridges >>
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