Newspapers, on the other hand, are binned at the end of the day. This sheet also has a superior tactile feel and a rich glossy/matt finish. As I explained earlier, the higher this value, the greater its capability of reproducing high-resolution images.Ī fashion magazine aimed at a premium clientele is made of a thick & coated sheet of paper. The next time you go out to buy a printer, do take a look at the DPI value listed in its spec sheet. It tells us how fine an image a printer can print, based on its print head’s ability to create dots of a given size. So, the higher the dots per inch, the better the resolution of the final image.Īnd this is exactly what DPI or dots per inch stands for.Your mind now registers a more continuous image – as against the more grainy, low-res images where in fact you can… make out the individual dots. As the dots are placed more closely together, it becomes difficult for the human eye to separate them or see them individually.If your printhead can create a smaller dot size, you can pack in more dots per square inch.Without getting into technicalities, this example of coarse-looking images printed in a newspaper versus high-resolution photos in a glossy magazine show that the capability of a printer to create smaller dots results in the following: I have broken this article into three separate parts to help you understand the topic. But I don’t want to be blamed for making you lose 6 hours of your life, following the exploits of Mr Joe Exotic 🙂 You are probably going to bounce straight off this page and binge-watch ‘Tiger King’ on Netflix. “Solvent inks have a hydrocarbon carrier with a pigment as their colorant and a resin as the fixing agent.” So the primary aim of this post is to help you understand the difference between solvent, eco-solvent, latex, UV and aqueous inks.īut if I jumped right off the bat and started listing the properties of these inks for example, if I made a statement like… It now becomes a little challenging for the end customer ordering print jobs to determine which ink works best for them.Īnd if you are an entrepreneur looking to buy a wide-format printer, it becomes even more important for you to fully understand the capabilities and differences between the various types of inkjet printing inks available today. And these machines will almost certainly deploy the different types of ink chemistries listed above. Now, most large-sized print bureaus, like Orchid Digitals, will have not one but multiple wide-format inkjet printers standing by to output their clients’ jobs. Some people even wonder about aqueous ink prints. Throw latex and UV inks in this mix, and things start becoming even more confusing. Many of my customers grapple with a question about the difference between, say, a solvent & an eco solvent ink print. And these are:Īnd this is where all the confusion starts. There are mainly five different types of inks used in the commercial print-for-pay industry today. Now, while the above steps have oversimplified the entire process, the point I am trying to make is that inkjet printing technology is pretty easy to grasp.Īnd I have crafted this post to cut through all the jargon and explain the same. The ink sticks and dries upon the said media.You need a mechanism to fire this liquid onto the print media.You have some ink that is in a liquid form.And most printers work on some common principles. And to the uninitiated, these terms can become a little overwhelming.īut honestly, the technology behind inkjet inks is not rocket science. Printshop operators (and machine sellers) casually use terms like UV inks, dot gain, pigments, DPI, optimiser, CMYK, solvent printheads, etc., etc. And more importantly, all these different models deploy different ink technologies. The market today is inundated with scores of companies selling a variety of printer models. And ever since the first commercial inkjet printers were introduced in the 1980s, inkjet inks and inkjet machine technology has constantly kept evolving. Wide-format inkjet printing is a multi-billion dollar industry.
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