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Thursday 21 February 2013

Different Printers, Different Inks

By Keren Kipfer


Without ink, our lives would be vastly different. We see it on everything from our food containers to our books and periodicals to our clothing. Ancient forms of ink were made from native plants, as well as tar, pitch and even burned bones. The inks of today are highly precise mixtures that ensure a quality finished product.

For most people, their daily contact with actually using ink happens at work or perhaps in the home office. There are a huge variety of these basic office printers, from large machines that can print, collate and staple hundreds of copies to smaller machines suitable for general office needs. These printers are easy to use, and pre-mixed ink cartridges are easy to install. For industrial use printers, this process is a bit more complicated.

Sophisticated types of inkjet printers, either a drop-on-demand or DOD printer or perhaps a continuous inkjet (CIJ) printer, are used in many industries to print product id information to their products. All food products and beverages will list an identification or a batch number, as well as a sell-by date or perhaps an expiration date. Pharmaceutical products also need to have similar types of identification, so this industry also will use either CIJ or DOD printers. However, these printers also are used in the electronics industry, automotive industry and for hundreds of other types of consumer products.

With continuous inkjet printers, produced by companies such as Maxima, a pump moves liquid ink through a gun body and then a tiny nozzle, which creates a constant stream of ink droplets. A CIJ printer can move more than 150,000 droplets per seconds. These printers are very fast and the inks dry very quickly. Both CIJ and drop-on-demand printers can be used to print many types of materials such as glass, metal, cardboard and plastics.

A drop-on-demand printer, which is typically just called a DOD printer, can be either piezoelectric or thermal, and both have their advantages and disadvantages. A piezo DOD printer can use a wide variety of inks, while a thermal printer must use thermal inks, and there is less of a selection. Thermal inks, however, do cost less than inks for piezo DOD coders. Thermal DOD printers use heat to help propel droplets of ink onto a surface, while piezo coders use an electric charge to force ink in and out of tiny nozzles in the form of microscopic droplets of ink. Altima, Domino and many other companies produce these DOD coders for use by companies that need to place product ids on their various goods.

While there are many high quality brands of both CIJ and DOD printers, purchasing a new machine is an expensive option. Instead, find a company that sells refurbished machines as well as low-cost replacement inks and make-up. You will still have the same level of quality and speed of output without the high cost. As you will constantly need to purchase quality ink, finding a company with high quality coder ink and fluids at low prices will have a big impact on your bottom line.




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