Gadgetory

it seems like not that long ago that handing in a freshly printed essay from your shiny new inkjet printer made you the coolest kid in class at least in your own mind anyway but nowadays printers that could have cost you a pretty penny in the mid-1990s are handed out like candy with new PC purchases and it's never been easier to afford something that will inexplicably stop working at 2:00 a.m. the night before your term paper is due so how exactly do printers work and what makes them well some of them so unreliable now you probably already know that the two main types of printers for home and office use are inkjet and laser unless of course you've still got one of those old dot-matrix printers from the 80s because you get a kick at it tearing off those little strips on the edge of the paper and both of them have advantages and disadvantages which we actually briefly covered in this video but let's have a look at them in a little bit more depth first up we've got laser printers which use you guessed it a frickin laser beam to create prints laser printers also contain a rotating cylinder coated with a photosensitive electrically charged material and a series of mirrors when you send a document to a laser printer the laser light is reflected by the mirrors onto the cylinder which neutralizes the electrical charge in specific areas thanks to the rotation of both the cylinder and the mirrors as well as the laser turning on and off at precisely the correct moments the areas hit by the laser correspond to the actual print and when toner particles hit the cylinder they only stick to the areas exposed to the laser light because the toner itself has an electrical charge to cool right then a sheet of paper is pressed against the cylinder and the toner is transferred through to the paper using heat which fuses the toner to it which is why pages fresh out of a laser printer are always so nice and cuddly warm due to the precision of the laser these kinds of printers are great for producing crisp clear the other major player the inkjet printer is very very different like the name says this sort of printer uses liquid ink instead of solid toner particles in consumer models ink inside of those expensive cartridges is heated with an electrical charge causing a small amount to vaporize and form a bubble on the nozzle the bubble then collapses and the pressure difference pulls a droplet of ink out of the cartridge and onto the paper because their internal workings are simpler than laser printers they tend to be significantly cheaper and although they can't print as quickly they give much better print quality for photos making them the go-to choice if you like to print your own snapshots at home unfortunately though many inkjet owners have been disappointed by their printers reliability so then why is it that they seem to give people such a hard time well part of it is because printers have so many small moving parts that can break or wear out not to mention the small nozzles that can clog easily but perhaps a bigger part of the reason is the business model of inkjet manufacturers the printers themselves are frequently sold at a loss so ink refills can cost more than the actual printers themselves also many cartridges contain smart chips that report that they're empty even if there is still leftover ink but fortunately there are workarounds for this you can find online and we're even starting to see alternatives appear on the market such as Epsons new system that uses permanent high-capacity ink tanks instead of pricey cartridges which will hopefully assure in the day when we no longer need to sell vital organs just to afford some vacation photo printouts speaking of things with small moving parts that need to be repaired I fix it I fix it comm is the world's free online repair manual they've got step-by-step repair guides and QA with their massive community I mean we're talking they've got 15,000 plus repair guides for iPhones iPads Macs Android devices got other computers etc it's all wiki based and therefore always up to date you know as long as the communities on the ball which actually they do a pretty darn good job of and ifixit.com is totally free with no ads or annoying paywalls so how exactly does that work Linus great question I fix it also sells a wide variety of tools for repairing all that aforementioned stuff with lifetime warranties on the tools by the way they got everything like their pro Tech tool kit which we use all the time with all these little hard to find bits and all these little adapters a little magnetic thing so you can like grab stuff out of hard-to-reach places they've also got their mat that helps you keep all your screws organized they got their whole bag that's got the tech tool kit the mat and a ESD straps a multimeter all that kinds of stuff so head over to ifixit.com slash tech wiki and check out not only their guide so you can salvage some formerly not working electronics but also their tools which make the job a heck of a lot easier and more fun if you're into that sort of thing so thanks for watching guys if you liked the video hit the like button if you disliked it hit dislike if you have suggestions for future fast as possible please do leave them below and we will try and check those out I'll see you guys next time