You can choose from a wide range of printers, as well as printing technologies, available in the market today. Among those that can deliver acceptable-quality color prints for your home and office use are the inkjet printers.

To create graphic and text printouts, inkjet printers use ink in cartridges and shoot jets of ink to the paper’s surface. If you look at the ink cartridge of inkjet printers closely, you will notice a small pump inside. This pump is designed to force the ink out of the well and squirt it through a nozzle onto the page. Inkjet printers produce a printout line by line, although the print mechanisms they use do not necessarily make contact with the page.

If you have been using a dot matrix printer for some time, you will most likely enjoy the different experience you get from inkjet printers.  Inkjet printers are not as loud as dot matrix printers, and they print faster. Inkjet printers produce a much better resolution, and have the capability of combining basic colors to create a wide range of colors.

Unlike dot matrix printers that use tractor-feed mechanism to allow the paper to move through the printer, inkjet printers employ friction-feed rollers. You only need to place a stack of pages in a feeder tray, and the plastic or rubber roller utilizes friction to grab the top paper and pull it into the inkjet printers. This saves you the time to separate pages from one another after you have finished printing. You also need not worry about alignments of the holes on page perforations to sprockets when using inkjet printers.

The advantages of inkjet printers over dot matrix printers do not stop there. If you have to print paper with irregular shapes and sizes, you can do so with inkjet printers. Inkjet printers have also the capability to print on envelopes and cards.

Depending on your budget, the quality of printout – ranging from fair to excellent – differs among inkjet printers. The determinants to printout quality are the ink dot size applied by inkjet printers and whether it is a four- or six-color process. Inkjet printers usually have ink cartridges that have four-colors: black, cyan, yellow and magenta. You can also find inkjet printers that use six-color ink cartridges with light cyan and light magenta inks. Because of this color process, inkjet printers can produce photo-quality pictures.

Inkjet printers are generally cheaper than laser printers. Ink cartridges contribute to the large portion of the costs when you choose inkjet printers. It is not unusual for each printed page from inkjet printers to cost between twelve and twenty-five cents.

Nonetheless, inkjet printers require minimum maintenance provided you use them within their design parameters. Inkjet printers come with an extensive maintenance software program which is built-in the system. You would only need to run this program occasionally to ensure that inkjet printers are in good operating condition. If you perform this basic maintenance task, you should be able to use your inkjet printers for years.

Unlike laser printers that usually get dirty, you do not necessarily perform periodic cleaning of inkjet printers. Do not, except when manufacturers highly recommend it in the owner’s manual, vacuum inkjet printers. When you purchase inkjets, they do not come with maintenance kits in addition to the software.

The only parts of inkjet printers that need occasional cleaning are the head nozzles, which squirt the various inks on the paper. If inkjet printers are not used frequently, the ink inside the nozzles tends to dry up and block the ink in the reservoirs from exiting. When that happens, all you have to do is to access and run the cleaning maintenance program.