History of Inkjet Printers | How Printers Work | Buyer's Guide

History of Inkjet Printers

Inkjet printers only appeared on the consumer market in the late 1980s. However, they had been undergoing development for around twenty years by that time.

Continuous inkjet printers were developed by IBM, and use electrically-charged droplets to coat the page with ink very quickly but also waste a lot of ink. This technology never gained wide popularity with consumers, but is used today in industrial settings, for labeling cartons and addressing direct mail. The more popular design among consumers is the drop-on-demand inkjet printer, invented by Siemens in 1977. These printers, which spray ink only where needed, are slower than continuous inkjet printers but less expensive. Most drop-on-demand printers, including those made by HP, Canon, and Lexmark, use thermal technology to push the drops of ink out of the print head; Epson uses its own technology, called piezo-electric, to achieve the same effect. The inkjet printer has come a long way since it became available almost twenty years ago and prices now are only a fraction of the original prices. For example, Hewlett Packard's DeskJet printer (one of the first released) was priced at $1,000 in 1988.

History of Inkjet Printers | How Printers Work | Buyer's Guide