★ Ink for Printers ★

Home Inkjet printers made a breakthrough in the latter half of the 1980s. Until then the Dot Matrix system dominated the market. Dot matrix printers used a series of small pins to strike a ribbon coated with ink, causing the ink to transfer to the paper at the point of impact. They were however slow and not suitable for printing images. Inkjet printers have grown in popularity and performance while dropping significantly in price.

The inkjet technique is based on a series of nozzles that spray tiny drops of ink directly on the paper to create an image. In a bubble jet printer, heat is created by resistors that vaporize the ink into a bubble. Originally most printers were based on a two cartridges system. One for black ink and one combined cartridge containing cyan, magenta and yellow for colour printing.

About:

Original Ink Cartridges
Compatible Ink Cartridges
Recycled Ink Cartridges

Nozzles

Nowadays many printers have separated cartridges for each colour which reduce waste of ink.

Since the price of Inkjet printers have come down substantially the true cost of printing is no longer related to the initial cost of the printer but to the sometimes ridiculously expensive cartridges. It is obvious that most manufacturers subsidies the price of their printers in order to profit on the highly lucrative sales of ink. This argument is underpinned by the fact that new printers are almost always delivered with half empty ink tanks.

In order to fight back competition from mainly Chinese producers of compatible ink cartridges the big manufacturers like HP and Lexmark do their best to complicate the ink cartridge and protect their profits with patents. This of course makes the cartridges even more expensive - and thus the use of compatible (where possible) or remanufactured cartridges becomes ever more economical.

Inkjet Printers