There are two different types of printers. Impact printers where the actual printer touches the paper to create and image. There are two different types of impact, character printers and dot matrix. Both involve striking the paper to leave an image.
The other type is non impact, and these include Inkjet printers. Inkjet printers are part of this group, and they use a series of different tiny nozzles to spray small drops of ink directly on the paper. When you click print, your computer will send a bunch of data to the printer driver.
The inkjet printer driver takes the information and translates the it to a form that the inkjet printer can understand. It makes sure there is paper located in the input area, and that everything is ready to print. The information then passes to the inkjet printer by a connection interface.
Older printers would use a serial cable, or parallel cable to take the information to the printer. Newer printers take the information and send it to the printer using a USB cable, but no matter which kind of delivery method. The information is received by the printer, and it is temporarily stored on the printer in a area called the buffer.
The buffer is a temporary storage area and they range in size from small, such as 516 kb or up to larger buffers such as 16 mb in larger buffers. The larger buffers can hold several documents at the same time.
Paper is fed into the printer, and the start of the page is started to print. The print head stepper motor uses a small belt to allow the print head to move across the page. It moves tiny amounts, and as it moved small dots of different ink is sprayed, the print head moves a tiny bit, and more ink is sprayed again. This process happens fast, nearly faster than the eye could see if you were able to view the inside of the printer during printing.
Multiple dots are sprayed a each tiny movement. Black and white inkjet printers spray only black ink, colour inkjet printers spray colour ink in precise little bits to make up the process. Each time the print head passes from side to side, the paper is advanced a tiny bit from the motor that feeds the paper through the printer.
Different ink jet machines operate differently. Some print heads print their way across, then return and print another pass. Others print both ways, across the page and then back. Either works. Printing time varies, and the printers today use fast drying ink to make it possible to pick up the page and not smear the ink.
