The ink used in the ink jet printers is the most important part in the printing
work. If the printer cartridge does not have proper or enough ink then there
will not be any printing or if the quality is not good then printing will be
poor. The history of ink is very old. In early days, oil based inks were used
for printing work. Now days printing inks are specially manufactured to deliver
high quality printing. Many people make a mistake of thinking that their
fountain pen ink and the inkjet printer ink are similar. This idea is far from
truth.
Inkjet printer ink is manufactured very differently from normal pen ink. There
are several ingredients used to manufacture inkjet printer ink. These indigents
consists of Dye or pigment color of a known particle size, Surfactants to
balance the surface tension and paper wetting, Resins to get good paper adhesion
and Biocides and fungicides and buffering agents for the correct pH, Humectants
such to minimize evaporation and head clogging and distilled and deionized
water. These ingredients are used to ensure that the produced ink is effective
in producing high quality printing. For spray printers with fixed permanent
print heads it is important that the ink does not get clogged in nozzles.
Whatever technology is applied to printer hardware, the quality of the resultant
printing product depends on ink and printer paper. These two elements are
vitally important when it comes to producing quality results. As for inks, two
entirely different types of ink are used in inkjet printers: Dye based and
pigmented.
1. Dye based inks:
They have high brilliance and wide color spreading and effect. These inks can
produce sharp print quality. The down side is that they are not light fast or
water fast enough. Also, they are slow at penetrating and take about ten seconds
to dry. They are generally better suited to straight forward single color
printing.
2. Pigmented inks:
This type of inks is better waterproofed. These inks are also fade resistant.
They are very fast drying and dry at about 100 times the printing speed.
Pigmented inks are better option for color printing. The reason is very simple.
In color printing, different inks are mixed. They need to dry as quickly as
possible to avoid blurring. If slow drying ink is used for color printing then
these is a possibility that the color inks do spill into one another before they
have dried. The end result could nothing be other then poor quality printing.
With increase in demand of refill packs and remanufactured cartridges, their
manufacturers have made sincere efforts to improve the quality. They are making
their inks according to the standards set by the original manufacturers. The
objective is simple. Their ink should match or exceed the printing quality of
the OEM. If your cartridge runs of the ink then you have options of buying
refill packs and remanufactured cartridges. Refill packs come with kit that will
help you to refill the cartridge.