Inkjet printers squirt ink through tiny nozzles. When they're left idle in a dry environment for a long time, the ink tends to dry up and clog them, and you get white streaks.
The "cleaning" basically involves moving the printhead over a receptacle with a sponge in it (it's called a spittoon, seriously) and firing all the nozzles for a short time while suction from a platen-driven vacuum pump sucks on them (that's why the feed rollers spin when it's doing this.) It uses a ridiculously large amount of ink in the process too - Google "waste ink container" for some further reading.
Ink is so expensive, that this sounds less like cleaning of printer head than it does a cleaning of the wallet. The conspiracy theorist in me says its designed to purposefully waste ink so you need to buy more.
--EDIT-- @DSMan195276 I cannot reply to your message (we're too far down the thread) - but the sensible less wasteful thing to do would be to offer the clean action as an option, not as a default on every startup.
Honestly, with how little printing most people do these days, and especially quality printing that would require an inkjet, I think I'd rather go to Kinkos than bother owning and maintaining a printer myself.
To respond to your response, while it may be sensible to offer cleaning as optional, I'm not really sure that's in anybodies interests. It's simply not fair to push this off onto the consumer, they'll have no idea when cleaning would be necessary. The printer is already doing the 'right thing' in that it will clean itself when necessary, and all that really needs to be done is make sure the printer is only using the necessary amount of ink when cleaning itself, and only cleans itself when it actually knows it's necessary.
For example, laundry detergent companies mark their measuring caps to measure out how detergent then you actually need, but companies found that if they didn't put any mark on the caps at all people on average assumed they needed more detergent then even the company said you should use, which was already more then you needed. People just have no reference point to guess when these types of things need to be done.
they'll have no idea when cleaning would be necessary
I wouldn't be so sure about that - I've seen a lot of office workers who probably don't have any idea how printers work know to take the toner cartridge of a laser printer out and rock it a few times when the printouts start to fade.
To me the biggest annoyance with cleaning (besides the ink waste) is how long it takes, and how difficult it is to do a test pattern print - usually it's a long cycle of "push cleaning button, wait a minute or more, then go back to the computer to fiddle with the disgustingly bloated software to get the test pattern option".
What I'd prefer is a simple pushbutton that starts cleaning the moment you hold it down, and keeps cleaning as long as it's held down. Next to it could be a "print nozzle check" button. Instruct the users to use these when streaks start showing up in the output, and there will probably be far less ink wasted as a result. (There will always be the idiots who lean on the cleaning button until the cartridges empty, but that's a problem of the existing system of fixed-length cleaning cycles too.)
The problem is in the perverse incentive that the printing producers have to "use" as much ink as possible, and consequently pay for it, which prevents significant progress on the consumption.
Well, progress would be already an excessively optimistic concept. There's no need to imagine conspiracies - one just need to observe how cartridges stop working before being fully depleted, or how ink is sold at ridiculously inflated prices.
This is exactly right. Of course to understand it you have to have experienced an 'early' inkjet printer which would, if left alone for a week "break" by not printing one or more colors. That led to printers with a wiper sponge and a bit of ink solvent. Better but not really all that reliable, and that led to the current squirt+clean+vacuum sort of systems which had been standard in large format printer/plotters for a while.
And yes, given the price per oz of ink the process is quite expensive (I've heard that it is as high as 0.25/cleaning). And in the least expensive Canon printers the "waste ink" sponge is irreplacable leading to a planned obsolescence of the printer itself. Most of the 'key' ink jet patents have expired so it may be possible for someone to build a printer that is more economical but so far no one has. I suspect if they externalized the true cost of the printer and avoided the ink subsidy that they would not sell enough printers to stay in business.
I chuckled at the idea of using an old 24 pin dot matrix (or why not go seriously old school and use a line printer) printer, it is informative to note that people used inkjet printers that broke down a lot rather than use the older dot matrix printers. Granted the Canon system sucks, the Epson system is a bit better but not by much, HP, well HP can't really afford to lose any margins in their printer business.
So perhaps there is an opportunity here for a new printer from a new company.
I gave away my impact printer because I had purchased an HP DeskJet 550c. It made sense as a replacement because it produced "letter quality" output and it made a really pleasant sound while printing. The landscape has changed a lot since the early 1990's.
How much "letter quality" printing do I need in an age of emailed PDF's?
Is futzing with consumables at the expense of flow better than noise? For me, I don't think so. I'm looking anew at printing like I came to recently look anew at the command line. There are tradeoffs, and for me one of those with home lasers and inkjets is loss of flow.
If I wanted old-school misery, we'd be talking pen plotters.
