Canon Printers, Copier Rentals and Dealers in Dallas, Texas (TX)

Printers and copiers are an essential business investment for large and small businesses alike. Purchasing commercial printers can be a big investment in the short term, but renting may be an affordable option for businesses needing high volume printing at a lower price per month. Since printer manufactures often create new models every year, often it makes more sense to rent your printers, fax machines, and scanners. 

One Dallas-based Canon printer rental shop located at 11969 Plano Rd. #130 has several options for renting as well as servicing most all of the Canon brands of copiers and fax machines. They also service HP laser printers and Canon color laser copiers. For small printers shop service is available for customers who prefer to bring their small machines to their shop.

Keep reading to learn about the History of Inkjet as well what it takes to clean different types of machines or if you you are a business owner would like full service rental, repair, and upkeep of your Canon or other office inkjet printer in Dallas/Fort Worth or DFW, contact Dallas Canon printer rental dealer Advanced Copier Technology, Inc for rental as well as monthly upkeep and support.

History of the Inkjet Printer - Canon, Epson & Others

Inkjet printers operate by propelling variably-sized droplets of liquid or molten material (ink) onto almost any sized page. They are the most common type of computer printer for the general consumer due to their low cost, high quality of output, capability of printing in vivid color, and ease of use.

Like most modern technologies, the present-day inkjet has built on the progress made by many earlier versions. Among many contributors, Epson, Hewlett-Packard & Canon can claim a substantial share of the credit for the development of the modern inkjet. In the worldwide consumer market, four manufacturers account for the majority of inkjet printer sales: Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Epson &  Lexmark.

The emerging ink jet material deposition market also uses ink jet technologies, typically piezoelectric jets, to deposit materials directly on substrates.

How to Clean an Inkjet Printer

The primary cause of inkjet printing problems is due to ink drying on the printhead's nozzles, causing the pigments and dyes to dry out and form a solid block of hardened mass that plugs the microscopic ink passageways. Most printers attempt to prevent this drying from occurring by covering the printhead nozzles with a rubber cap when the printer is not in use. Abrupt power losses, or unplugging the printer before it has capped the printhead, can cause the printhead to be left in an uncapped state. Further even when capped this seal is not perfect, and over a period of several weeks the moisture can still seep out, causing the ink to dry and harden. Once ink begins to collect and harden drop volume can be affected, drop trajectory can change, or the nozzle can fail to jet ink completely.

To combat this drying, nearly all inkjet printers include a mechanism to reapply moisture to the printhead. Typically there is no separate supply of pure ink-free solvent available to do this job, and so instead the ink itself is used to remoisten the printhead. The printer attempts to fire all nozzles at once, and as the ink sprays out, some of it wicks across the printhead to the dry channels and partially softens the hardened ink. After spraying, a rubber wiper blade is swept across the printhead to spread the moisture evenly across the printhead, and the jets are again all fired to dislodge any ink clumps blocking the channels.

Some use a supplemental air-suction pump, utilizing the rubber capping station to suck ink through a severely clogged cartridge. The suction pump mechanism is frequently driven by the page feed stepper motor – it is connected to the end of the shaft. The pump only engages when the shaft turns backwards, hence the rollers reversing while head cleaning. Due to the built-in head design, the suction pump is also needed to prime the ink channels inside a new printer, and to reprime the channels between ink tank changes.

The ink consumed in the cleaning process needs to be collected somewhere to prevent ink from leaking all over the surface under the printer. The collection area is known as the spittoon, and in Hewlett Packard printers this is an open plastic tray underneath the cartridge storage and cleaning/wiping station. In Epson printers, there is typically a large fibrous absorption pad in a pan underneath the paper feed platen. For printers several years old, it is common for the dried ink in the spittoon to form a pile that can stack up and touch the printheads, jamming the printer with sticky slime. Some larger professional printers using solvent inks may employ a replaceable plastic receptacle to contain waste ink and solvent which needs to be emptied and/or replaced when full.

The type of ink used in the printer can also affect how quickly the printhead nozzles become clogged. While the official brand of ink is highly engineered to match the printer mechanism, generic inks cannot exactly match the composition of the official brand since the actual ink composition is a trade secret. Generic ink brands may alternately be too volatile to keep the printhead moist during storage, or may be too thick and jellied leading to frequent printhead channel clogging.

There is a second type of ink drying that most printers are unable to prevent. In order for ink to spray out of the cartridge, air needs to enter somewhere to displace the removed ink. The air enters via an extremely long, thin labyrinth tube, up to 10 cm long, wrapping back and forth across the ink tank. The channel is long and narrow to slow down moisture from evaporating out through the vent tube, but some evaporation still occurs and eventually the ink cartridge dries up from the inside out.

The frequent cleaning conducted by printers can consume quite a bit of ink and has a great impact on cost per page determinations.

Clogged nozzles can be detected by printing a pattern on the page. Methods are known for re-routing printing information from a clogged nozzle to a working nozzle.

If you as a business owner would like full service rental, repair, and upkeep of your Canon or other office inkjet printer in Dallas/Fort Worth or DFW, contact Dallas Canon printer rental dealer Advanced Copier Technology, Inc.  

Professional inkjet printers

Besides the well known small inkjet printers for home and office, there is a market for professional inkjet printers; some being for page-width format printing, but most being for wide format printing. "Page-width format" means that the print width ranges from about 8.5" to 37" (about 20 cm to 100 cm). "Wide format" means that these are printers ranging in print width from 24" up to 15' (about 75 cm to 5 m). The application of the page-width printers is for printing high-volume business communications that have a lesser need for flashy layout and color. Particularly with the addition of variable data technologies, the page-width printers are important in billing, tagging, and individualized catalogs and newspapers. The application of most of the wide format printers is for printing advertising graphics; a minor application is printing of designs by architects or engineers.

Another specialty application for inkjets is producing prepress color proofs for printing jobs created in the digital realm. Such printers are designed to give accurate color rendition of how the final image will look (a "proof") when the job is finally produced on a large volume press such as a four-colour offset lithography press. A well-known example of an inkjet designed for proof work is an Iris printer, and outputs from them are commonly "iris proofs" or just "irises".

In terms of units, the major supplier is Hewlett-Packard, which supply over 90 percent of the market for printers for printing technical drawings. The major products in their Designjet series are the Designjet 500/800, the new T-series (T1100 & T610), the Designjet 1050 and the Designjet 4000/4500. They also have the HP Designjet 5500, a six-color printer that is used especially for printing graphics as well as the new Designjet Z6100 which sits at the top of the HP Designjet range and features an eight colour pigment ink system .

A few other suppliers of low volume wide format printers are Epson, Kodak and Canon. Epson has a group of 3 Japanese companies around it that predominantly use Epson piezo printheads and inks: Mimaki, Roland, and Mutoh.

Scitex Digital Printing developed high-speed, variable-data, inkjet printers for production printing, but sold its profitable assets associated with the technology to Kodak in 2005 who now market the printers as Kodak Versamark(tm) VJ1000, VT3000, and VX5000 printing systems. These roll-fed printers can print at up to 1000 feet per minute.

More professional high-volume inkjet printers are made by a range of companies. These printers can range in price from $35000 to as high as $2 million. Carriage widths on these units can range from 54" to 192" (about 1.4 to 5 m) and ink technologies tend toward solvent, eco-solvent and UV-curing as opposed to water-based (aqueous) ink sets. Major applications where these printers are used are for outdoor settings for billboards, truck sides and truck curtains, building graphics and banners, while indoor displays include point-of-sales displays, backlit displays, exhibition graphics and museum graphics.

The major suppliers for professional wide- and grand-format printers include: Agfa Graphics www.agfa.com Gandinnovations, LexJet, Inca, Durst, Océ, NUR (now part of Hewlett-Packard), Lüscher, VUTEk, Zünd, Scitex Vision (now part of Hewlett-Packard), Mutoh, Mimaki, Roland DGA, Seiko I Infotech, Leggett and Platt, Agfa, Raster Printers, DGI and MacDermid ColorSpan (now part of Hewlett-Packard).

If you as a business owner would like full service rental, repair, and upkeep of your Canon or other office inkjet printer in Dallas/Fort Worth or DFW, contact DFW Canon printer dealer Advanced Copier Technology, Inc.