in an ink jet printer having a plurality of ink jet channels which are individually controllable to produce ink dots on a printing medium , crosstalk is reduced by activating each odd numbered channel in alternation with each even numbered channel , while offsetting the orifices of one group of channels from the other to compensate for the time difference between activations , and the voltage supplied to excite the channel transducers is varied as a function of the number of channels simultaneously exited to maintain a fixed excitation voltage across each transducer .