You print out things every day, but have you ever stopped to figure out how printers actually work? All too often we take for granted the items in our homes and offices that we utilize every day, never stopping to question how something works until that thing stops working properly. If you’ve never investigated the procedure before, learning how printers function can actually be pretty interesting.

If you have a printer in your home, it’s most likely an inkjet printer. Since their introduction to the marketplace in the early 1980’s, inkjet printers have remained the most popular printers for purchase. And how do they work? Sometimes when you look at a page printed from an inkjet printer, you’ll see just clean, straight lines. Take a closer look. Placing the paper under a magnifying glass to examine the printing up close would reveal that the lines are actually created by very small droplets of ink. The printer sprays tiny droplets of different inks in the proper pattern and mixture onto the paper to make different colors and form the image, even if it’s a full photograph or a print in black and white.

The dots of ink are incredibly tiny, with a diameter even thinner than that of a human hair! Almost all inkjet printers come with just a few staple colors. To form a variety of colors, the printer has to combine some different color droplets together. For example, blue and red may be combined to create purple and yellow and blue together result in green.

Inkjet printer and laser printers are very different creatures. As sad before, inkjet printers will print by using tiny droplets of ink. Laser printers, however, are different in that they use dry ink, also called toner, in order to create the images that you’re trying to print. Then, using static electricity and heat, the ink is bonded to the paper. The dry ink powder is also called laser toner, although they look like regular printer cartridges.

If you were to take a printer apart, you’d find the print head, which is at the core of all inkjet printers. This head contains a number of small nozzles that spray the little droplets of ink onto the paper. The ink cartridge is inserted at this part of the printer and quickly whizzes back and forth across the paper by the action of a print head stepper motor.

When you try to print something, you initiate a chain of events. Firstly, the data is transmitted to the printer driver. The driver then translates the data into a language that the printer can understands and makes sure that the printer is ready to print. If there has been a lag time since the last printing job, the printer will need a quick cleaning session. Once it is free, it will begin to pull the sheet of paper into the printer. As the ink is sprayed onto the page, the motor stops for the briefest of moments. This process occurs so quickly, though, that the paper appears to move out continuously. This is what happens for the document to be transmitted from bits of data on your screen to a sheet of paper in your hand.