Learn About Printer Ink, Ink Cartridges and Inkjet Printers

Don’t know much about ink, printer ink or ink cartridges? Read on for more information.

The first man-made ink originated thousands of years ago in Egypt and was made from charcoal mixed with glue, but many different kinds of ingredients have been used, including fruit or vegetable juices, tannins from oak galls and even secretions from squid and octopus ink.

Today’s inks for printers are made with different ingredients, however. Color printer inks are usually made with linseed oil, soybean oil or another oil base, which is called the “vehicle”. Various organic dye pigments such as peacock blue, yellow lake and diarylide orange are used, but inorganic pigments such as cadmium yellow also provide the color. Even white pigments are used in color ink to change the way the colors appear. Black inks are simply made with carbon black, but printer ink in general also contains a number of other ingredients such as waxes and lubricants, which assist the printing process.

Inkjet cartridges were introduced in 1984, replacing the old dot matrix printing method. An inkjet printer cartridge doesn’t just hold ink; it also has a number of circuits, which control the ink nozzles that the ink comes out of. An inkjet printer works by spraying extremely small droplets of ink on the paper through the ink nozzles, which combines to form the images or words you see on the paper. Inkjet printers are called “non-impact”, because they do not touch the paper while printing, unlike a dot matrix printer.

An inkjet printer typically uses one of two different technologies to create the ink droplets it sprays on the paper:

The bubble jet method, which heats the ink to create small bubbles. When the bubble bursts, the ink sprays out of the nozzle onto the paper. The bubble bursting also creates a vacuum, which pulls more ink into the print head to be sprayed on the paper.

Piezoelectric, a method patented by Epson. This method uses “piezo crystals”, which are charged with electricity, causing them to vibrate. The crystal vibrations push ink out of the nozzle and spray it on the paper and also pull more ink from the ink cartridge into the nozzle.

An inkjet printer will work with typical copier paper, but you won’t get the best quality possible from your inkjet printer. The difference is that standard paper is rougher, which will cause light that hits the ink to scatter, making it appear dull. Inkjet paper is designed to be smoother, which makes the colors appear brighter.

Inkjet paper also addresses how the ink is absorbed. Standard paper doesn’t absorb the ink nearly as well as inkjet paper, which causes a condition called “feathering”. This means that the ink will spread out and appear fuzzy, especially at the edge of text and images. Inkjet paper is coated with a wax that absorbs the ink much better and causes the ink to stay in a neat symmetrical pattern when it hits the paper.

Now you know there’s more to an inkjet printer and an ink cartridge than meets the eye!