Exploring Printer Ink Colour Combinations

While printer ink may be just a line item on your budget, the way these inks work together can help you understand what you are loading into your printer every month. With a few tweaks and additions, you could save on ink cartridges and waste less toner.
Printers typically utilize variations on the three primary colours. These colours are typically Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), and Yellow (yellow). By understanding how these three work together, you can make more informed printing decisions.

Black: Black is made by combining all other colours until no one single colour can be reflected back to the eye. By combining all three primary colours in equal amounts, printers can create a colour similar to black. But because this is a crude combination, prints can often come out brown or grey. That is why, when your black printer cartridge is low, your prints come out grey. Printer cartridges come in black as well and most offices utilize black ink for their prints to create more brilliant blacks. Some offices, however, don’t need many documents to go out of the office and therefore choose to simply allow the typical CMY group to get the job done. This is not typically recommended, as black ink creates a more preferable, legible print. Black is abbreviated as K, which stands for Kohle, the German word for coal. This is so the colour spectrum RGB (Red, Green, Blue) will not be confused with the normal printer spectrum of CMYK.

Cyan: As a blue with some green in it, Cyan is used largely as a subtractive colour, removing brightness from colours, rather than adding it. It is critical to creating shadow and expressing the darker end of the colour palette. Cyan can come as its own cartridge or in a combined CMY ink cartridge.

Magenta: Unlike Cyan, Magenta contains no green at all but does contain a bit of blue. It is a subtractive colour also but helps push prints towards the middle of the colour scale. This colour can also come on its own or in a combined cartridge with Cyan and Yellow.

Yellow: Perhaps the most complex colour in the primary scale, Yellow is a blueless colour that absorbes all wavelengths of blue from light. It can mix with blue to create green at the darker end of the spectrum, but can also be combined in light or heavy doses to create a wide range of colours on the brighter end of the spectrum. This colour can appear in printers on its own or combined with Cyan and Magenta.

Samsung Makes After-Market Printing Chips Obsolete

While many printer ink and toner cartridges have become interchangeable, no matter what printer your office uses, after-market printer chip providers have made a business out of helping you keep your printer current with modern technology. But with the release of a new printer, technology manufacturer Samsung seeks to make after-market printer chips obsolete.
The printer is known as the Samsung ML1640,1660, 1915 series. These models include a new feature know as “Stealthware,” designed to automatically activate new firmware features based on set time frames. This design hopes to help users stay current with modern print technology.
The Stealthware system can be tailored to fit with any printer platform and can be set to update due to an internal time clock, page count, calendar date and more.

As their printers age, some customers worry that page yields will suffer. Now, with automatically updating firmware, printers will stay relevant longer, causing these concerns to grow. Many office professionals don’t realize that printer cartridges are designed to cover only 5 percent per page. If you are printing a lot of pictures, graphics and large logos, you may use up ink cartridges faster than a printer used strictly for printing text documents. Customers concerned about page yields as their hardware ages should talk to their local printer ink specialist, bringing an example of a typical print project.

As technology makes printers last longer, business owners and workers should keep an eye on their printer performance to ensure that they are still getting the best out of their equipment.

Cheaper Laser Printers Have the Most Expensive Printer Cartridges

A few years back small to medium sized businesses preferred laser printer cartridges more than ink cartridges. Today the gap is becoming closer because there are many different choices available on the market and the prices of printers are becoming cheaper.

Before buying a cheap laser printer, you should calculate its ongoing costs. In most situations, you would end up paying a lot more because the refills are typically expensive. Manufacturing companies have been hiding the truth about the real cost of producing their laser printers. In reality, the cost of one unit of laser printer is not that cheap, but these companies belief that they will profit more on the sales of cartridges. Selling the printing devices with a dicey deal is just their marketing strategy to get more profits in the long term.

Many people are now aware that the cheaper a printing device is, the more expensive its refills would be. A leading brand like Hewlett Packard has reaped around $15 billion in profit from the sales of printer cartridges alone. This is because most businesses do a lot of printing on a daily basis so basically they will keep buying new cartridges.

Ink cartridges are relatively cheaper than the laser ones. Their printing capacity differs from one brand to the next. Overall, it’s up to you to decide but keep in mind that cheap laser printers are likely to have expensive cartridges.

Australia Post Celebrates National Recycling Week By Repurposing Printer Cartridges As Pens

Australian parcel service Australia Post goes through a lot of ink cartridges, printing shipping labels and work orders for packages across the nation. But this year, the company hoped to make more from printer cartridges than a few extra deliveries. To celebrate National Recycling Week, Australia Post partnered with environmental non-profit Planet Ark to recycle used ink cartridges into pens.

The Enviroliner felt tip pen is made from more than 95 per cent of recycled plastics and inks, with one cartridge making two pens. Each person who donated a printer cartridge to the cause got to take the pens home as souvenirs, giving the ink and plastic new life.

Project organizers released a statement, saying the project was designed to combat e-waste; the disposal of technology items that may contain harmful chemicals and can harm the groundwater around landfills. Mobile phones, computers, tube televisions and printer ink can all add toxins like mercury and lead to the environment if not disposed of properly. Planet Ark’s campaign manager Brad Gray stated that one third of people still throw printer cartridges in their home trash.

“By making e-waste recycling so accessible Australia Post is helping to encourage more and more people to get involved,” said Mr. Gray.

Beyond just pens, printer and toner cartridges collected by the program will be used in a variety of ways. Some will be returned to their original manufacturers so they can be refilled and parts can be repurposed. The remaining cartridges will be converted into new products such as pens, park benches and rulers.

HP Takes Digital Printing Innovations On The Road In The UK

With a cadre of new innovations and a rock-star-style tour bus, printer ink and technology retailer HP is hitting the road, bringing printer and printer cartridge demos to destinations across the UK.

According to a statement released by HP this week, its branded truck will make eight stops between November 15th and December 2nd to showcase faster printers, more graphics capabilities and simpler HP ink cartridges.

HP will kick-off the roadshow at Sandown Park, in Esher, hitting London and Manchester along the way. The tour will also stop in Scotland; hitting the Midlands and Edinburgh. The tour concludes in Ireland with stops in Belfast and Dublin and, like true rockstars of the printing world, the tour finishes with a stadium: Curvaheen Park Stadium in Cork.

With a host of new innovations to introduce to its customers, the tradeshow will focus on recent speed upgrades for HPs T200 Inkjet Web Press, as well as the clearer graphics offered by new ink cartridges and delivery systems, introduced at tradeshows throughout this year. HP believes the faster, more efficient printers can help businesses increase profits and fill more orders, keeping up with the faster pace of commerce.

“As the graphics market shifts from analogue to digital printing, we are helping print service providers grow their businesses with new capabilities, enabling them to expand into new application areas and improve delivery times for high-volume digital printing,” Jan Riecher, vice president and general manger in graphic solutions business at HP, said Friday.

Value for money- printer refills, recovery fluid, and more

Running a printer can be expensive, particularly if you’re busy, and seem to spend a lot of time buying printer refills and other essentials. The best way to deal with this constant spending is to find a good source of cheap ink cartridges. Ink and toner are very expensive in the retail market, and these costs can get to be annoying for busy people.
Click Here To Read More

Buying discount inks and toners and getting top printer performance

If you do a lot of high quality printing, you will know the story about retail ink prices only too well. The amount of money, vs. the results, can really get on your nerves. The solution is good quality discount ink and toner, and finding a reliable bulk supplier.
Click Here To Read More

The Print Status dialog box is your best friend

When printing, the Print Status dialog box pops up and usually just goes through the motions of printing. The results of printing can vary, and it’s usually because people don’t know how to use the Print Status box properly. It’s really very easy, and you can also do maintenance on your printer, check your ink status, and test your ink and toner feeds.
Click Here To Read More

Printers, performance and inks- Making sense of your printing needs

Printers are hard working machines, and they’re usually pretty reliable. The performance problems often relate to maintenance, materials, and using the right inks. It’s worth your while to spend some time researching what your printer needs for best performance, and checking out the ink cartridge and toner situation.

Printers and print jobs- Matching your printer to your work

The type of jobs your printer needs to do define the type of printer you need. Most people have multi function printers, which are also scanners, copiers and faxes.

If you run your own business, your printer will be doing a lot of work of all kinds, which means you need a high performance, name brand printer. These printers are used for everything, all the time.
Click Here To Read More

Colour printing – Do’s and Don’ts

Colour printing is really a matter of getting some fundamental processes done properly. If you’ve seen some of the very strange things that colour printers can produce, you’ll know what we mean. There are ways of avoiding these horrors, and getting good prints every time. Getting the right ink cartridges is the first step.

Colour printing basics

Colour printing is a really a combination of software, hardware and your printer. A good printer and good software, with a good graphics card, will give you great prints.
Click Here To Read More