A $150 Canon Selphy CP770 is a two-piece printer and bucket set. CP760 stands at 8.1 inches high and 10.9 inches wide. The onscreen home menu of this cheap printer is easy to read and uses several icons to display the current settings. Picture editing is narrowed down to an image optimizer and five color presets: Vivid, Neutral, Positive Film, Sepia, and Black/White. The body of the Canon Selphy is a slimmer rectangle with a covered panel that reveals a port for the external paper tray, an IrDA port, and slots for SD, Memory Stick, and Compact Flash cards. The proprietary ink cassette fits into a protected bay on the right side of the printer. An external power adapter plugs into the back of the device, but it lacks a rechargeable battery that would make the printer wireless-ready out of the box.
The CP770 cheap printer uses dye-sublimation ink technology to heat-transfer images onto Canon’s proprietary paper; Canon sells different media options, including greeting cards, postcards, and 2-inch by 3-inch credit cards. The dye-sublimation printing process is different from typical inkjet; the paper makes four passes through the machine: the first three lay down the base colors (cyan, magenta, yellow) and the last pass places a thin overcoat on the image to prevent discoloration and extend durability.
The Selphy CP770 printed a photo at an average rate of .79 pictures per minute. These cheap printers are fast and easy-to-use.
===========
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Traditionally, most commercially available inkjet printers have a print engine which forms part of the overall structure and design of the printer. In this regard, the body of the printer unit is typically constructed to accommodate the print head and associated media delivery mechanisms, and these features are integral with the printer unit.
This is especially the case with inkjet printers that employ a printhead that traverses back and forth across the media as the media is progressed through the printer unit in small iterations. In such cases the reciprocating printhead is typically mounted to the body of the printer unit such that it can traverse the width of the printer unit between a media input roller and a media output roller, with the media input and output rollers forming part of the structure of the printer unit. With such a printer unit it may be possible to remove the printhead for replacement, however the other parts of the print engine, such as the media transport rollers, control circuitry and maintenance stations, are typically fixed within the printer unit and replacement of these parts is not possible without replacement of the entire printer unit.
As well as being rather fixed in their design construction, printer units employing reciprocating type printheads are considerably slow, particularly when performing print jobs of full colour and/or photo quality. This is due to the fact that the printhead must continually traverse the stationary media to deposit the ink on the surface of the media and it may take a number of swathes of the printhead to deposit one line of the image.
Recently, it has been possible to provide a printhead that extends the entire width of the print media so that the printhead can remain stationary as the media is transported past the printhead. Such systems greatly increase the speed at which printing can occur as the printhead no longer needs to perform a number of swathes to deposit a line of an image, but rather the printhead can deposit the ink on the media as it moves past at high speeds. Such printheads have made it possible to perform full colour 1600 dpi printing at speeds in the vicinity of 60 pages per minute, speeds previously unattainable with conventional inkjet printers.
Such a pagewidth printhead typically requires high precision and high speed paper movement and as such the entire print engine (printhead, paper handling mechanisms and control circuitry etc) must be configured accordingly to ensure high quality output.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide a print engine having a pagewidth printhead that can be readily employed within a standard body of a printer unit and is constructed in a manner that ensures that all the necessary parts of the print engine are configured in a manner that enables consistent, high speed printing.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
In a first aspect the present invention provides a capping assembly for capping a pagewidth printhead of an inkjet printer comprising: a body configured to extend the length of the printhead; and a capping element housed within said body; said capping element having a rim portion adapted to cap at least a portion of said printhead; wherein, the capping element is movable with respect to said body between a first and a second position, said first position being where said rim portion extends from said body, and said second position being where said rim portion is contained within said body.