All About Printer Ink

Inkjet printers are by far the most common type of computer printer for the general consumer. In the personal and small business computer market, inkjet printers are used more than any other type. Inkjet printers are usually cheap, quiet, reasonably fast, and many models can produce high quality text and graphics.

Like most modern technologies, today's inkjet printers were built on the progress made by many earlier versions. Among many companies, Hewlett-Packard and Canon can claim a substantial share of credit for the invention of the modern inkjet printer. In the worldwide consumer market, four companies account for the greater part of inkjet printer sales: Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Epson, and Lexmark.

Printer ink can be described as the liquid that these kinds of printers use to "spray" on the page, reproducing anything from text to graphics to photos. Most inkjet printers use only four base colors of printer ink: black, magenta, cyan, and yellow. From these primary ink colors, the printer is able to reproduce all the shades of color that make up your typical color photo.

The small inkjet printers used in small offices and homes all use aqueous inks, which are made of a mixture of water, glycol, and some dyes or pigments. This type of ink is fairly inexpensive to make, but is difficult to control on the surface of the paper or other media. Therefore, it usually requires a specially coated media. Aqueous inks are usually used in printers with disposable inkjet heads (cartridges), because these heads require water in order to perform.

In professional wide format printers, a much wider range of inks are used, such as solvent inks, UV-curable inks, and dye sublimation inks. However, because of the hardware needed to apply such inks, most consumers will never use any of these types of ink.

Today, some high-end inkjet printers use more than just the four primary ink colors. For example, some inkjet printers will employ eight separate ink color cartridges. The additional color cartridges allow the printer to reproduce media like photos in more accurate, vibrant, and true-to-life color than can be achieved with the traditional four-color cartridge system.

Either way, color ink cartridges are usually sold as a set, which saves the consumer a little money when it's time for a refill. The black ink cartridge is always available to purchase separately on its own. This is because some people only use their printers to print text, which generally doesn't require any other color besides black.

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