Actually, both thermal and piezo inkjet technologies work just fine. People have looked specifically for thermal shock in live mammalian cells printed with thermal inkjet technology, and essentially not found any. Likewise, people claim piezo inkjets may be problematic, because they use ultrasonic frequencies similar to those used to lyse cells.
Fact is, there are different teams using (and swearing by) both technologies, but they both seem to work.
We've printed live E. coli cells from a thermal inkjet head onto agar plates with no problem at BioCurious:
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/68942898@N05/8032098121/in/pool-bioprinter
We did decide to move away from the scavenged inkjet printer we were using originally, but mainly because the 1200 dpi resolution you find in most current inkjets is starting to push the boundaries in terms of nozzle size etc. 1200 dots per inch means a pixel size of 21 micron, but the print nozzles are actually quite a bit smaller than that. Plus we discovered that the inkjet cartridges we were using seemed to have a filter built into the silicon with hole size that was even smaller than that, so we might not even be able to print E. coli with that one.
Academic labs using off-the-shelf inkjet technology are typically using a ancient HP 500 model that has native 300 dpi resolution - those seem to be ideal in terms of nozzle size etc:
http://www.jove.com/video/3681/creating-transient-cell-membrane-pores-using-a-standard-inkjet-printer
We decided to go with a special low-resolution HP print cartridge designed for printing labels onto things like cabling etc. Just 12 nozzles at 96 dpi, but the big advantage is that someone has already figured out how to drive the print head, and developed an open hardware Arduino shield for it:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nicholasclewis/inkshield-an-open-source-inkjet-shield-for-arduino
http://nicholasclewis.com/projects/inkshield/
One of these days we'll be writing all of this up in a nice instructable. In fact, much of tonight's BioPrinter meeting was dedicated to putting together a light tent some we can take some nicer photographs, and then taking pics as we took the BioPrinter apart down to its bare bones...
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