The print head, which is the engine of your printer and which may or may not be located inside the cartridge, houses hundreds of tiny, delicate nozzle assemblies. Each nozzle assembly consists of a tiny ink chamber, a resistor that controls the flow of ink, walls that guide the ink to the right position, and a nozzle plate with a hole, from which the ink will be sprayed onto the printer paper.
After each time a nozzle fires, a new supply of printer ink is automatically drawn into its chamber, to be ready for the next time. When the printer is told by the computer to print a page, the copper circuits on the end of the ink cartridge send a message to the nozzle's resistor, which then heats the nozzle's ink supply just enough to cause it to expand and to force a drop of ink through the nozzle onto the printer paper.
The ink which flows through each nozzle assembly functions as a lubricant and coolant for the nozzle: if there is no ink in the chamber when the resistor turns up the heat, the nozzle assembly will quickly warp and break apart -- the resistor can reach a temperature of hundreds of degrees very quickly! If the print head is allowed to begin this process of burnout (i.e. if the ink cartridge is not refilled or replaced promptly), the damage may range from poor print quality (streaks or lines across the page, bad coloration, light or dark patches on the page) to serious damage to the printer.
It is very important never to attempt to print with an empty ink cartridge. If in doubt, top off your cartridges frequently (the leftover ink from your inkjet refill kit can be stored until the next time you top off).
Having Fun With The Printer Support Techs
Many years ago when I was a copier technician my boss would always tell us to push our companies supplies, paper, toner etc.. Of course they wanted to sell more supplies and make more money but their techniques were very questionable. Just like printers you could go out and purchase generic supplies and some worked better than others naturally. Well the supplies that we sold were also mostly generic, however, they were branded with our companies name and logos. Here's where the sneakiness comes in. When a customer complained about a repair cost estimate we were told to blame it on their inferior generic supplies and to further that the repair would have been much cheaper if they were using our over-priced supplies.
My Printer Died - An Epitaph
My printer just died. My Epson C60 that I've had for almost 2 years was my buddy. I loved that printer. It was there for me through thick and thin. Sure it had it's quirks and idiosyncrasies like not printing when my office temperature dropped to 17 degrees because I forgot to turn the thermostat up one bitterly cold morning. I had to open the lid and point a ceramic space heater inside to thaw it out.
When Is Black Not Black?
Did you notice how many different black inks there are available? At last count we have forty different black inks listed on our web site. You may be wondering how many shades of black can there be? Well there are actually different shades of black which I will explain in a bit.
