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Ink Refill Kits

Ink Refill Kits Article

The basic problem with inkjet inks is the conflicting requirement for a colouring agent that will stay on the surface and rapid dispersement of the carrier.

Desktop inkjet printers, as used in offices or at home, all use aqueous inks based on a mixture of water, glycol and dyes or pigments. These inks are inexpensive to manufacture, but are difficult to control on the surface of media and therefore often require specially coated media. Aqueous inks are mainly used in printers with disposable, so-called thermal inkjet heads, as these heads require water in order to perform.

In professional wide format printers, a much wider range of inks is used, most of which require piezo inkjet heads:

* Solvent inks: the main ingredient of these inks are VOCs. The main advantage of these inks is that they are very inexpensive and also enable printing on uncoated vinyl substrates, which are used to produce vehicle graphics, billboards and banners.
* UV-curable inks: these inks consist mainly of acrylic monomers with an initiator package. After printing, the ink is cured by exposure to strong UV-light. The advantage of UV-curable inks is that they "dry" as soon as they are cured, they can be applied to a wide range of uncoated substrates and produce a very robust image. Disadvantages are that they are more expensive, require expensive curing modules in the printer and the cured ink has a significant volume and so gives a slight relief on the surface.
* Dye sublimation inks: these inks contain special sublimation dyes and are used to print directly or indirectly on to fabrics which consist of a high percentage of polyester fibres. A heating step causes the dyes to sublimate into the fibers and create an image with strong color and good durability.