There is no clear inventor as such of the inkjet printer
although rumors point to an IBM technician named Steven Sears. It was invented
in 1978, and in 1988 Hewlett Packard released the Deskjet Printer as a consumer
item for a whopping price of $1000.
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| ADF-based inkjet all in one printer |
An inkjet printer places small droplets of ink onto paper to
create an image, and it’s advantage was that it sprayed ink only when necessary
and so, overall, was not very expensive.
The early inkjet printers focused only on affordability, not
quality, and so were able to print low quality black and white documents fairly
quickly.
Printer developers still faced problems with the printer,
namely because the flow of ink from the print head to the page needed to be
controlled and because, at the time, dried ink would clog the printer head. IBM
devised a strategy of using electrically charged droplets for coating the pages
with ink but this failed due to a variety of reasons. It was here that
Hewlett-Packard and Canon built on the idea of an inkjet printer by introducing
liquid ink held in cartridges and just like that, a more efficient and
consumer- friendly system was born.
If you are used to hitting your printer because it’s not
working like you want it to, think of the long journey it has traveled to be
sitting on your table, and hopefully, will changed your view on this
masterpiece of engineering precision.
