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Inkjet MEMS - Are They Really Worth It?
Before You Buy Inkjet PaperThere are lots of different types of inkjet papers available. But actually, these different varieties only have four major differences ..... The inkjet printers have been continuously improving since the first inkjet printer became available to the consumers in 1988, courtesy of Hewlett-Packard. If you wanted to get your hands on the brand new printer back then, you'd have to shell out $1000. Nowadays, you can buy a Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer for a measly $49 or even less. Every year new and better inkjet printers are released with higher resolutions, higher speeds, and more fancy words that shouldn't matter to someone who's just looking for something to print vacation photos on.
Why does your 8-year-old need an inkjet printer that has the maximum resolution of 5760x1440 dots per inch (dpi) to do school assignments? The answer is she doesn't. With such low prices, the printer manufacturers need to find some way to coerce people into upgrading their barely-used printers. One way to do that is to constantly increase the resolution, the dpi, which is the most common way we judge the quality of the printer. Clearly, a 600x600 dpi quality is not good enough now. You need at least 1200x1200, except the numbers keep climbing every year! Recently, we have started hearing about an amazing new technology for inkjets, MEMS, which stands for Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, that is bound to revolutionize the inkjet printer.
Now, your old inkjet printer just isn't good enough for homework or family photos, since the new technology, MEMS, made it obsolete. You may even see the printer specifications boasting that MEMS is utilized and that's why this particular printer, costing $499.99 is better than the competitor's $99.99 printer. You might ask, however, what exactly is this MEMS and why is it important?
Micro Electro Mechanical Systems are tiny machines that range in size from a micrometer (one millionth of a meter) to a millimeter (one thousands of a meter), machines that you cannot see without a powerful microscope. These machines make it possible for printers to produce high resolutions using tiny printer heads. It's not easy to fit over eight million (8,064,000) independent droplets of ink on one inch of paper to achieve 5760x1440 dpi resolution. Each such droplet has a volume measured in picoliters (one trillionth of a liter). This technology is extremely interesting and even mind-numbing, especially since it now lives in an inkjet used by your 8-year-old. However, there is no reason why you need to have a Ph.D. in physics and understand the processes involved in the construction of your inkjet's print head.
The fact of the matter is that MEMS, while an exciting technology, should not be found on printers as a way to lure customers to buy the latest and greatest printer. Let's leave Micro Elecro Mechanical Systems to the physicists and instead really think why our 1200x1200 dpi is no longer adequate and whether it really isn't.
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