Inkjet MEMS for Printer

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 5760×1440 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 600×600 dpi quality is not good enough now. You need at least 1200×1200, 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?
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