Which Kind Printing Ink Better for Your Business & Saving the Cost?

Hi, nice to see you again, my dear friends! A week will over again. Today's topic is about printer ink. There are several different types in regular use in digital printing, each with very different characteristics. Those characteristics are what you need to understand when making your investment decisions, because they can make a big difference in cost and quality.

The core of any inkjet printing system is the ink, which is essentially pigment suspended in a carrier liquid. The job of the ink is to deliver the pigment to the media and to bind it to the media’s surface. The range of substrates that the ink will work with, ultimately determines the applications that a printing engine can handle.

Make the wrong choice, and you will be disappointed with the results. Ink vendors are currently working to expand the range of substrates their inks will work with directly, so that substrates don’t need to be treated with a primer.

Ink manufacturers see huge potential beyond the graphic arts into more industrial uses for their ink products, such as furniture and car manufacturing. The carrier liquid plays a key role in determining which substrates the inks will work with.

Water is the cheapest and most sustainable carrier, but once it has delivered the pigment to the media, the water then has to be dried. Since water tends to soak into uncoated media, this also means that water-based inks can only print to coated media, and though there’s a fairly wide range of suitable substrates, this does push up the cost of consumables.

Nonetheless, standard aqueous ink printers are relatively cheap and have excellent colour fidelity. Typically aqueous inks can produce very sharp images with vibrant colours, and most vendors have models with up to twelve inks for increased colour gamut. This makes them suitable for producing photographic and fine art posters. Images from these printers are normally thought of as for indoor use only, however they can be laminated for outdoor use as well.

Material printed with aqueous inks is particularly suitable for retail point of purchase signs because it doesn’t give off the unpleasant odours common with some solvent and UV inks. The majority of textile printing also uses water based dye sublimation inks that are suitable for printing to polyester fabrics. The water acts as a carrier to place the pigment, either directly onto the fabric or onto a transfer sheet.

A heat press is then used to boil the inks to a gas, driving the pigment into the textile fibres, so that when the inks cool down the image has fused with the fabric, rather than simply sitting on top of its surface.


Okay, these all above are my share about the knowlege of many kinds printing ink. If you have any other needs or questions welcome to contact us at any time. We will provide you the best quality product and service. Hope my article can be useful to you. Thank you for your reading.