Hacking an Inkjet printhead

[Mechatrommer]

In fact the need for "K" (black) in the CMYK printing is necessary since adding the other 3 colors to produce black isn't perfect and so "K" black is a cheat to improve the results.

if you want to get fancy, you can do like canon did, they have green ink in addition to conventional CYMK... if you want to get deeper into theoritical color, you can investigate why 6-8 epson color have similar hue 2 cyan and light cyan color, magenta and light magenta color, black and light black, light light black color... and why yellow doesnt need light yellow, go figure. i believe all these variants will result in different spurt algorithm... and the objective is not much rather to increase color gamut, including the blackness of the black, and increase the perceived printout resolution/gradation... anyway, people were happier with 4 color CMYK before the advent of these newest printing/halftone technology... even now, greater than 4 colors printing still in the domain of higher priced printers.. cheap arse 4 color printer users are still happy with the result...

[tooki]

Agreed, adding colors quickly gets into the domain of diminishing returns. My current 7-ink Canon is honestly only slightly better than the 4-ink one I had before (though it is faster).

FYI, Canon doesn't use green ink any more - I guess they changed the cyan and yellow formulations such that green is now satisfactorily mixed, and now their top photo printers add dedicated blue instead. (Both old and new models have red ink). So now it's CcMmYKGyRB plus pigment black and color optimizer.

Btw, wanna see something awesome? Look at HP's continuous web inkjets: https://youtu.be/whWfoQlza0A

[iranmodel]

سلام مهندس میشه پیام خصوصی زدم چک کنی در مورد کپی مردن هد پرینتر کنون و پروگرم کردنش ممنون میشم

Hi,
I have a brilliant Idea about building a custom printer, I want to know if we have a standard regarding the inkjet printer heads?
Do we have a such thing? can we control them? do you have any idea?

[Bicurico]

Z-Corp printers (3D printer) used to work based on HP inkjet cartridges.
They would suck out the ink and replace it with a binder.
I think the protocol can't be that complex or HP might disclose the protocol against a NDA and a valid business model.

Edit: not sure how brilliant your idea really is. Netter you make sure that your idea is not already patented...

[tooki]

I discovered long after this thread was started that HP sells various OEM inkjet systems, both printer mechanisms (with carriage) as well as heads intended for the customer to mount (either in a custom carriage, or more typically stationary, with the print medium moving past the head, like for printing expiration dates on bottles). For the latter, they have a wide array of cartridges with various inks for all types of substrates.

Amusingly, one of the systems they still sell now is actually the old ThinkJet head/cartridge: literally the very first consumer inkjet ever sold. But it’s much simpler to implement (since it requires no head capping mechanism, no vacuum pump to clear the nozzles, and it’s only 180dpi, so simpler drive electronics) than the 600dpi systems would be. Some HP document scanners, for example, have the ThinkJet head installed in the scan mechanism to “stamp” a date and time on each sheet as it is scanned.