The chances are, you, just like me, have an inkjet printer at home. The chances are you use the printer occasionally to print several pages of text or a bunch of photos. The chances are next time you going to use the printer, it won’t work for the printhead are clogged.

Of course, the best way to get rid of clogged jets is to prevent them. Some say you should print regularly (daily/weekly or else), some would advise you to get a laser printer instead. But when you’ve already got this problem, how to troubleshoot the cloged printer?

There is a way to bring your inkjet printer back to life.

The essence of problem with clogged printhead is that ink dries inside the printhead jets, letting no liquid ink from cartridge tank to go out. Given that, the essence of unclogging a printhead lies in dissolving that dried ink.

There are arguments about what is the best solvent to clean inkjet heads. People naming this or that solvent are both right and wrong. The thing is there no best solvent, there is one that dissolves the particular type of ink.

Understanding printer ink

Before we start, there is something to know about printer inks. In one of previous posts I cited one good article titled “Debunking the Myths of Digital Inks” by Tony Martin. If somehow you have not read the article yet, I will brief you on it.

In general, in any printer using water based inks, whether they are dye, pigment or hybrid colorants, they tend to have similar formulations.

They use mainly water, a colorant or mixture of colorants, dye, or pigment or both, a wetting agent like glycerin that allows the liquid to flow and allow the ink to enter the paper surface, a product to slow down drying on the heads like glycol, and often an alcohol to speed drying on the paper surface. Some inks with pigments require an adhesive to attach the particles to the paper surface, so they use a resin, usually acrylic.

This all gives us the idea of what reagents to use for dissolution (at least I strongly hope it does.)

Selecting a solvent

How would one know what exact solvent is suitable for his or her case? That’s pretty easy to figure out.

Usually there’s decent amounts of ink spilled everywhere in these situations. Instead of risking your potentially expensive heads, try your various solvents on dried ink outside of printing head. If you don’t already have spills to clean up, then intentionally make one. Let it dry and then clean it up… with “whatever” you’re contemplating running through the printer.

If it doesn’t work outside the printer, neither will it unclog the head from inside. If it dissolves the ink, then you have a much better chance of success.

A troubleshooting advice

To help you dissolve dried ink in printhead, here is a receipt that should work on the majority of water based inkjet printer inks.

The mixture uses either ammoniated window cleaner (which uses glycol, alcohol, water and ammonia) with extra isopropyl alcohol, or in places where ammoniated window cleaner isn’t available, use ammonia mixed to about 1% concentration, and adding the isopropyl.

However, there are some inks that use different technologies and may not work with these solvents.

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Kyocera Mita America recently announced its FS-1300D, the latest ECOSYS® monochrome laser printer a competitive six-second first print out time, and standard duplex for double-sided printing.

This desktop printer delivers 30 pages-per-minute print speeds and a six-second first print out time, critical for printing tasks that include short simple document jobs. The FS-1300D has a powerful controller and standard 32MB of memory (upgradeable to 544MB) to meet large document output needs.

Focused on end-user productivity, the Energy Star Compliant FS-1300D offers two new features:

• a LED panel, providing users color indicators to highlight the printer’s status at the device, and
• a Status Monitor, which relays information for the printer directly to a users desktop.

These new features are designed to simplify customer interaction and improve the workflow, performance and productivity within the office.

Further, the FS-1300D offers the user a set of standard and optional features, including standard 1200 dpi print resolution for high-quality black and white imaging, standard Hi-Speed 2.0 USB connection, standard 250 sheet output/input trays, standard 50 multi purpose tray, which handles alternative media stock from heavier paper to envelopes and labels; optional 250 sheet paper feeder, with a maximum paper capacity up to 800 sheets, and an optional network interface card.

The Kyocera Mita FS-1300D ECOSYS monochrome laser printer is available through authorized dealers at a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $530.00.

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“Middling in price, performance, and design, this color laser printer suffers from spotty documentation.”

This is a tagline of Melissa Riofrio’s reviewed of Ricoh Aficio SP C222DN Color Laser Printer for Washington Post. She says the Ricoh’s Aficio SP C222DN, being a lower-cost color laser printers, demonstrates some of the challenges of lower-costing. This midpriced printer performs adequately but could use some refinement.

First problems started with the installation. Instructions for physical setup are wordless (it’s comics-like poster) but pretty clear. It says to proceed to the “Software Installation Guide for Network Connection” for further instructions, but those are dreadfully inadequate, missing steps and key details. Worse, a document covering USB installation is available only on the included CD, making it less than readily available. The rest of the documentation, available in both HTML and PDF, is good.

The design was also found confusing at various points. The control panel’s few buttons perform some functions through obscure key combinations, and the printer has no LCD to spell them out for you. The foldout front panel lacks handles and feels flimsy, as does the 250-sheet main input tray. Extending the tray for legal-size paper involves a finicky pinch-and-pull process; the handle for pulling out the tray is in the same area as the manual-feed slot, too, which can be confusing. The top-exiting, 150-sheet output tray is straightforward, at least. An optional 500-sheet input tray is available. Automatic duplexing is standard, which is nice.

In conducted tests text documents churned out at a speed of 17.4 pages per minute (ppm) and graphics pieces output at 2.4 ppm (at best). Text looked dark and precise; but graphics we printed on plain paper suffered from a slightly faded look, as well as graininess or moir patterns. Use of glossy laser paper fixed the problem, but only partially.

Toner capacities of the SP C222DN are low, which means high consumables costs. The machine comes with starter black, cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges of 1000-page yield. The standard-size cartridges last for 2000 pages each and cost $55 for black (2.7 cents per page) and $100 for each color (5 cents per color, per page). The cartridges are easy to install and replace, but the transfer placement could have been better (it lies exposed during the process.)

Ricoh’s Aficio SP C222DN is targeted for small offices or workgroups, but for its spotty installation documentation and inferior design elements miss the mark, it leaves much to be desired; such users deserve a more friendly experience.

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At an event on March 10, 2008 in Tel Aviv, Hewlett-Packard offered a peek into future printing technologies, introducing a new inkjet printer that prints thousands of pages per minute and ink that retains its shine even when exposed to extreme elements.

HP’s water-based Latex Ink is specially formulated to embed in a surface and become part of a media print, said Stephen Nigro, senior vice president of HP’s graphics and imaging business. HP’s Latex Ink can withstand snow and rain and is useful for large-format media used on billboards and outdoor signs.

The company also launched the Inkjet Web Press printer, which can print up to 2,600 A4-sized color pages a minute at a cost of under US$0.01 per color page, Nigro said.

The Latex Ink includes a specially created formula, called latex polymer, that provides the print surface its durability and color, according to HP. Water-based ink ejected carries the latex polymer and pigment particles to the surface. The inks are 70 percent water and 30 percent of additives and other inks, HP said. The ink was developed by HP and HP Labs.

Unlaminated outdoor displays using the ink can last up to three years, while unlaminated in-window displays can last up to five years.

The printer cartridge uses recyclable material and the company has developed new recyclable substrates for the ink to make printing environmentally friendly, HP said. Other printing technology for large-format media include UV (ultraviolet) curable ink, which interacts with an ultraviolet light source to create a print.

HP also showed the Inkjet Web Press, a printer that prints up to 2,600 A4-sized color pages a minute. The printer will be able to print on pages up to 30 inches (76.2 centimeters) wide, Nigro said. It is targeted at replacing the printed pages coming from traditional offset presses.

A printing job with a traditional offset press takes hours and it’s not possible to print on demand. With a traditional offset press, a machine first creates a physical plate with the image etched on it, which is then sent to print. With the Inkjet Web Press platform, hitting the print button sends the image directly to a printer, making high-volume printing more productive by eliminating analog elements like a plate, Nigro said.

The printer is built around the Scalable Printing Technology (SPT) platform, which improves the quality of prints by spraying more ink on pages using thousands of nozzles on a single printhead. SPT is already in use on printers like HP’s Photosmart, Nigro said. HP introduced the Photosmart Minilab ml1000 inkjet printer earlier this year, which can print 4-by-6-inch photos as fast as 1,500 prints per hour.

Via www.cio.com

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One of the exhibits on CeBIT 2008 was Samsung’s new color laser. The company claims the Samsung CLP-310 to be the world’s smallest color laser printer.

Apart from size, the CLP-310 stands out with its quietness - the company promises an ultra-low noise level of 46dB. The printer come cased in both traditional grey and stylish black, a new option aimed at sexing up the image of Samsung’s printers.

“We have emphasised the style of these devices, and we intend for them to take a proportion of the consumer inkjet market,” Joosang Eun, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing for digital printing, told PC Pro. “We believe laser technology is better for the consumer. Laser quality is better, durability is better, TCO is lower, and on our new laser printers you can even print glossy photographs. For us this is the inkjet killer.”

It remains to be seen, however, whether consumers will bite. Although prices are not set, a standard CLP-310 is estimated to cost around 200 GBP (around $400), with networked and wireless options costing extra.

Traditionally, lasers repay their higher purchase price with cheaper consumables, but few home users will print enough pages to make the CLP-310 economical. What’s more, while the CLP-310 may be the “world’s smallest color laser”, it’s no smaller than a standard color inkjet, and at only 4 color pages per minute it’s not far ahead on speed either.

A few test prints on the sample units at Samsung’s CeBIT stand indicated that print quality is fine for everyday use. There was, unfortunately, no glossy paper on hand to test promises of photo-quality prints, but plain paper output was more than satisfactory, with rich, bright colors and crisp, solid blacks. The mechanism was certainly on the quiet side, as much as the expo qualifies as a place to measure sound levels.

Yet a representative at the company’s CeBIT stand took the view that weaknesses such as this were beside the point. “At the end of the day,” he explained, “these are printers for the MacBook generation. It’s about style, rather than function. People will buy them simply because they’re cool.”

via http://www.pcpro.co.uk

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One day you will get anything you want without going to local supermarket. The only thing you’d have to buy will be an inkjet printer. Using it, you will not just print images and text, but also get yourself other stuff for very day life.

The scientists have adopted the inkjet printer for printing electric circuits, artificial bones, blood vessels and body organs. Yet, inkjet printing proves versatile technology for creating other non-imaging products.

A Massachusetts, US-based company Konarka Technologies has announced that it has successfully manufactured solar cells using inkjet printing technology. Using the existing and very simple technologies of an office inkjet printer, Konarka has replaced ink with the solar cell material, and paper with a thin flexible sheet of plastic.

Here is how it works. The printhead of an inkjet printer deposits a solar cell material into a thin flexible plastic sheet. According to the company, the process creates solar cells which are almost as good as the silicon ones, created with more advanced technologies. The beauty of the new method is that it makes solar panel much cheaper, as it uses existing, generally accepted technology and requires no special clean premises.

Multiple colors can be added to “ink” to print patterns onto the cells, customizing them for different environments. Konarka says the technology may ultimately produce solar cells to generate energy from both sunlight and indoor light, and to supply lower power devices, like indoor or sensor applications.

The flexibility of the solar cells allows for a variety of locations where traditional solar panels could not be installed. Moreover, Rick Hess, president and CEO of Konarka, said in an interview to PopularMechanics.com that they “constantly receive calls from innovators who have read about the cells and propose unique—sometimes wild and crazy—concepts for the technology.”

For the moment, the inkjet printing is only feasible for large productions of solar cells. First consumer products are not likely to appear within next two years.

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To continue the subject of connecting a printer to several computers, it’s worth to notice there may be another type of connection – wireless.

Let’s suppose you have a wireless network running in your home or office and you need to get a new printer up and running.

One way to do so is to connect the printer through a cable to one of computers and share the printer over the network. Don’t forget to install the printer drivers on the computers.

Alternatively, you can go completely without cables and connect the printer wirelessly. The way is more suitable in a space-sensitive room, and you are not dependant on the spare place on the table. Besides, you can put the printer in a place more convenient for people to reach.

To connect printer wirelessly you will need what is called print server. It’s a gadget that plugs into printer’s interface port. Again, the print server can be of two types—USB and parallel:

As a dedicated device, print server requires drives to be installed and configured. The actual settings may vary and depend on the device model.

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