When you buy a new inkjet printer for your business, you quickly discover that it only accepts a limited number 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 aggravating. However, if you look inside the design principles that guide printer hardware, you’ll notice that not all inks are made of the same materials, effectively preventing one printer’s cartridges from working in another.
Printer Design
Printer ink is far more sophisticated and machine-specific than universal liquids like automotive washer solvent or window cleaner. Printer and print head designs differ from one manufacturer to the next and from one model to the next. Thermal inkjet printers heat their nozzles, causing them to expel tiny ink bubbles and sucking in ink as the heat dissipates. Piezo-electric inkjets use an electric current to bend a piece of crystal, opening an ink nozzle and emitting a droplet without the use of heat. The proprietary ink formulations used by manufacturers reflect their hardware configurations and output capabilities.
Ink Types
The types of ink used by these devices differ from manufacturer to manufacturer, just as printhead technologies do. The majority rely on dye- or pigment-based formulations. Dyes are the older and less expensive of the two technologies. Their vibrant colours and finely detailed output make for eye-catching prints, but they can fade faster than pigments, which are made up of colour particles suspended in a liquid. Paper absorbs dyes, which improves friction resistance but can blur details. Pigments dry on the surface of the paper, which helps images stay sharp, but their behaviour makes them susceptible to wear.
Cartridge Shapes
Even within the products of a single inkjet printer manufacturer, different cartridge designs are specified for different models. Although some of these cartridges may fit multiple models of hardware, these printers share hardware characteristics that allow them to share inks. When you try to install cartridges designed for a different hardware series, you’ll run into the “square-peg-in-a-round-hole” problem.
Output Integrity
Many inkjet cartridges technically fit interchangeably into the slots for other colours in the same printer. That doesn’t mean they can’t be used interchangeably, unless you’re doing a colour channel experiment. Inkjet user guides advise you to correctly install cartridges and to run a cleaning cycle on your hardware if you accidentally insert one in the wrong place. Even if your printer has more than four ink tanks, you’re unlikely to confuse the black ink tank with another colour. Because of the prevalence of text in typical output, most printers use a larger container for black ink.
