An ink jet printer is any printer that fires extremely small droplets of ink onto paper to create an image. If you ever look at a piece of paper that has come out of an ink jet printer, you know that: Ink jet printers are fairly inexpensive - less expensive than laser printers, and much less expensive than color laser printers.

Different types of ink jet printers form their droplets of ink in different ways. There are several technologies used by printer manufacturers, but by far the most popular technique is the bubble jet. In a bubble jet printer, tiny resistors create heat, and this heat vaporizes ink to create a bubble. The expansion that creates the bubble causes a droplet to form and eject from the print head. A typical bubble jet print head has 64 or 128 tiny nozzles, and all of them can fire a droplet simultaneously. 1