Ever wonder why your inkjet printer uses a lot of ink? The reason behind this is due to the design of the print head. The print head is the small electronic device which spits the ink onto the paper after it has gone out of the ink cartridges. In other words the actual part of the printer which flies back and forth over the paper and applies the ink to the paper. Because the modern print head has to print at very high resolutions there are literally tens of thousands of small holes from which the ink is sprayed from to produce the high quality images which we all demand.
These holes on the print head are many times smaller than the diameter of a human hair and because of this can become blocked or ‘clogged’ very easily. The inkjet printer has a sponge running the whole width of the print head track (underneath the print head) so when you hear your printer racing back and forth when you are not printing it is actually cleaning itself. The print head is actually squirting your valuable ink onto the sponge as it cleans the print head surface. As the sponge gets filled up the ink gets deposited into the waste container underneath the sponge. Anyhow take a look at the video below and see for yourself where all of your valuable ink is going. (PS: the printer in the video is an Epson)
Now that you’ve seen where a large amount of your expensive ink is going you may like to have a read of this article: Why do ink cartridges cost so much. Very interesting to read that 80% of most printer companies profit comes from consumables !
