Printer ink cartridges
Laser printing is a popular printing option for home users and small businesses around the world and recent improvements in ink printing technology have driven the quality of ink printing higher whilst also driving the cost of owning and running an ink printer way down.
An ink printer works by feeding a piece of paper across an area where small droplets of ink are dropped onto the page to arrange the image requested. The droplets are very small at around 50-60 microns across and are positioned very carefully with resolutions on some ink printers coming at around 1440x720 DPI (or dots per inch). All inkjet machines require a black cartridge and most colour but different machines have different configurations on the colour cartridges. Some take a tri-colour (cyan, magenta and yellow in one) which can be easier to replace but if all you ever printed was yellow then you could be wasting the other two cartridges. Most take a 3 cartridge configuration again with cyan, magenta and yellow separately. A small but growing selection of photo printers take even more colours calling them either Photo cyan or Light cyan but they all serve the same purpose of being able to offer a wider palette range by mixing the colours across a larger range and producing more vibrant and better quality photos.
The largest advantages to ink printing are being able to print how you need it, when you need it. Ink printers are fairly low cost to purchase and the ink they take is not expensive. Ink printers also require very little maintenance and although some require replacement printheads most require none as replacement printheads come with each new cartridge. Every major manufacturer of printer has developed the technology and produced wide varieties of different inkjet printers. Most print in colour but others only black and white. Some print very quickly whilst others a little slower. Some operate as multifunction machines (printer, scanner, fax and copier altogether). Although they all differ in how they operate the one thing they have in common is they all take ink cartridges.
To help you identify the correct printer ink cartridges for your printer, we have included a list of popular ink cartridges from our featured supplier - The Retail Factory.
