Canon Bubble Jet BJ-80 (Original, 1985)

What the Canon BJ-80 was

The Canon BJ-80 was a thermal inkjet printer made by Canon Inc. and launched in December 1985. It was the first product in Canon's Bubble Jet (BJ) line and printed using the heat-driven, drop-on-demand method that Canon markets under the Bubble Jet name. Canon's own records document the machine's launch and its printing technology; they do not state figures such as resolution or print speed, so those are omitted here rather than estimated.

The first Bubble Jet printer

Canon describes the BJ-80 as the world's first inkjet printer to employ Bubble Jet technology. In 2015 the company marked the model's thirtieth anniversary, dating its launch to December 1985. This "first" claim comes from Canon itself and is reported here as the manufacturer's own characterization rather than as an independent verdict.

How Bubble Jet printing works

Bubble Jet is Canon's name for thermal inkjet, a drop-on-demand method. A thin-film heater inside each nozzle chamber is pulsed with current, flash-boiling a microscopic layer of ink to form a vapor bubble; the bubble's sudden expansion ejects a single droplet onto the paper, and surface tension refills the chamber as the bubble collapses. That bubble is what gives the technique its name. It is distinct from the piezoelectric inkjet approach, which ejects droplets by mechanical flexing rather than heat. A fuller account of the mechanism appears in the general thermal inkjet reference.

Origins: the 1977 discovery and patent

Canon traces the technology to an accidental observation in the 1970s, when a heated soldering iron touched the needle of an ink-filled syringe and drove droplets from its tip. In October 1977 the company filed what it calls a basic patent for the world's first thermal inkjet (Bubble Jet) technology. A key patent from this work (No. 01396884) later received Japan's Imperial Invention Prize, the highest award of the National Commendation for Invention, in 1994.

Place in printing history

Thermal inkjet was developed independently and at roughly the same time by Canon in Japan and Hewlett-Packard in the United States, and the two companies are recognized together as co-originators of the approach; the attribution of Canon's work to engineer Ichiro Endo comes from sources such as Optica and Wikipedia, as Canon's own pages do not name an individual inventor. The BJ-80 opened Canon's BJ and later BJC Bubble Jet lines, which the company carried through the 1980s and 1990s before the consumer brand gave way to PIXMA. Alongside HP's contemporaneous ThinkJet and DeskJet printers, the BJ series helped establish thermal inkjet as one of the two dominant desktop inkjet architectures.

Documented specifications and reference scope

Authoritative Canon sources confirm the BJ-80's December 1985 launch, its status (per Canon) as the first Bubble Jet printer, and its underlying thermal inkjet technology. Those same sources do not publish numeric specifications for the model — resolution, print speed, memory, interfaces, or price — so this page omits them rather than guessing. This is a historical reference page, not a buying guide, and it quotes no current pricing or availability.