subject: Printer Ink Cartridges Are The Choice For Most Commonly Used Printer Types [print this page] Printer Ink Cartridges Are The Choice For Most Commonly Used Printer Types
Although inkjets may be fantastically cheap nowadays and seem to be the obvious choice in selecting a general-purpose printer, it is important to note that there are viable alternatives to the popular inkjet. The main categories of printers are dot-matrix printers, lasers and inkjets. All of the consumables for these devices come in printer ink cartridges. Cartridges offer a lot of convenience and Lexmark printer ink cartridges as well Dell ink cartridges offer convenient and easy replacement choices for users of these printers.
Inkjets printers work by spraying ionized droplets of ink onto a page. Today's inkjets offer colour as standard. Photo inkjet printers produce high quality prints that rival the output of colour lasers. New models offer DPI (dots per inch) densities that are several times higher than the original 300 DPI that inkjets started with. In fact, some basic printers from Lexmark now offer 4800 DPI printing. Colour inkjet printers have CMYK printer ink cartridges so they can also be used as black and white printers.
Dot-matrix or impact printers resemble typewriters in that they use closely- spaced pins together with an inked ribbon contained in a cartridge to print letters or other characters on a page. The number of pins in the print head determines the quality of the print. Pin densities range from 9 to 24 pins. Dot-matrix printers, compared to the newer-technology printers are comparatively slow. Because impact printers can be used with carbon paper or similar media types, they are used for invoices, purchase orders, shipping forms, labels, and other multi-part forms, where they can produce more pages in a single pass.
There are variants of the basic technologies enumerated above such as:
Portable thermal printers that use basic resolutions for plain text printing. These printers require special paper and have limited application and usage.
Solid Ink printers use wax sticks in a phase-change mechanism to print a page. The wax sticks are liquefied into reservoirs which transfer the ink to a drum. These printers are generally more reliable than colour lasers and produce better colour consistency than other colour printers.
LED/LCD printers are identical to laser printers in that a light source is used to create an image on a drum. These printers are known to produce very high quality text and graphics printouts.
Dye Sublimation printers are mainly used by professional printers for graphics and photographic applications. These printers apply colour in a continuous tone, providing the precise shades that professional jobs require. As with thermal printers, dye sublimation printing requires special paper which allows the dyes to diffuse onto the paper surface to create the exact colour that a client demands.
More special needs also beget specialized tools and the following printers fall under this category.
The VersaLaser and various 3D printers create physical objects from drawings or digital data. These printers output in hours what normally takes days to create.
- Plotters produce line drawings to a fine degree, which is why they are commonly used for the technical trades like engineering and architecture. There are flatbed plotters and drum plotters. While drum plotters are more compact than flatbeds, they are noisier in operation.
- Label printers are used to print, well, labels. These are single-application devices and are usually used only for businesses that require extensive label printing. Like most mainstream printers nowadays, ink refills for these printers come in the form of printer ink cartridges.
Network printers are shared high-capacity and high-output devices that serve several users in an office. Multifunction printers such as the Lexmark X2690 and the Dell 1355cnw are actually hybrid devices that offer colour inkjet or laser printing with colour copying and colour scanning functions. Dell ink cartridges for the 1355cnw are readily available online. As previously stated, Lexmark printer inks also come in cartridge form. printer ink cartridges have become the standard container for most home and business use today for their ease of use and convenience and these ubiquitous plastic cartridges are a staple product in any business supply store.
