You rapidly learn that a new inkjet printer you buy for your company only works with a particular range of ink cartridge models. If you run out of ink and your office supply store is out of the consumables for your hardware, that no-substitutions design can be annoying. However, if you examine the design rules that govern printer hardware, you’ll discover that not all inks are composed of the same materials, which effectively prevents the cartridges from one printer from working in another.
Printer Design
Compared to general liquids like vehicle washer fluid or window cleaner, printer ink performs a significantly more complicated and machine-specific function. Manufacturers and models all have different printer and print head designs. Ink is sucked in and blown out of heated nozzles in thermal inkjet printers when the heat is dissipated. Without utilizing heat, piezoelectric inkjets bend a piece of crystal using an electric current to open an ink nozzle and release a droplet. Manufacturers employ specific ink formulas that take into account the hardware setups and output capacities of their products.
Ink Types
The kinds of ink that these devices employ differ across manufacturers much as print head technologies do. The majority rely on formulas that use either dyes or pigments. The older and less expensive of the two methods is dyeing. They produce prints with eye-catching colors and fine detail, but they can be more prone to fading than pigments, which are made up of color particles suspended in a liquid. Paper absorbs dyes, improving its friction resistance but also blurring the details. While pigments help images stay crisp by drying on the paper’s surface, their behavior makes them vulnerable to abrasion.
Cartridge Shapes
You can find distinct cartridge designs intended for various models even among the goods of a same inkjet printer manufacturer. These printers share hardware characteristics that allow them to share inks, even if some of these cartridges may fit more than one model of hardware. The “square-peg-in-a-round-hole” issue will occur if you try to install cartridges designed for a different hardware series.
Output Integrity
Technically, many inkjet cartridges can be used interchangeably in the printer’s slots designated for various colors. Except when using color channels in an experiment, this does not indicate they are equivalent. Inkjet user manuals advise you to install cartridges properly and to perform a hardware cleaning cycle if you unintentionally put one in the incorrect location. You are unlikely to confuse the black ink tank on a printer with more than four inks for another color. Black ink is typically stored in a larger container on printers due to the common use of text in output.
