Do All Ink Cartridges Have The Exact Same Colors Of Ink

2010-01-12

As technology keeps surpassing itself year after year, it has left a wake of literally hundreds of has-beens. Ink jet printers being one of them. But has-beens are still ubiquitous in homes and offices around the world, which, means that the cartridges compatible to these printers still need to be produced in order to keep these printers up and running. There are a couple of ways to do this: searching online endlessly for outdated, yet new, printer ink cartridges, refill the cartridges yourself by buying the ink for from a retailer, or recycling them through an OEM (original equipment manufacturer), who refills the cartridge.

There is no need to wonder if the color of printer ink is going to be the same from one manufacturer to the next. The color depends more on the ink cartridge itself. For example, some color ink cartridges have only three tanks that mix the cyan, magenta and yellow inks to produce all colors. However, some cartridges have a fourth tank -black - that produces deeper shades and purer colors. So output may vary between these two styles, but the inks that are filled to create the colors are the same. Some printers that are used to create film quality photographs can have up to eight tanks to produce optimum vibrant colors. Even those are required to use the correct and ubiquitous ink colors.

Although the colors are the same, the ink can vary from poor quality to very good photographic quality ink. Being as the ink cartridges are water based, drying time is a huge factor in ink quality. There are two types of ink used: one is very fast drying, which is good if the printing to be done is of a color copy, and the other is very slow drying, better utilized with monochromatic printing of the same color. Large companies are continuously investing money to create better pigments in the dyes of their colors that will be able to dry faster, therefore able to print on a wider variety of media without the problem of smudging. So far, black is the only color with superior drying capabilities, therefore leading to a problem of bleeding when mixed in with the others.

Up until 1995, variances in color were also due more to the different applications used to create uniformity in color. Having so many different kinds of tools to create colored productions was difficult. In 1995, Microsoft came out with a device to help calibrate the colors from device to device. Since there are over 26,000,000,000 colors produced by the combinations of cyan, magenta, yellow and black, this was a good thing. Luckily, these colors remain consistent in all printer ink cartridges.