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Inkjet Online ::
Ink Cartridges
| Ink Cartridges |
INK CARTRIDGES
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Ink Cartridges
Inkjet Online has been supplying ink and ink cartridges online since 2003. We stock a large range of cartridges in all the big brands. Canon, Epson, HP, Lexmark, Brother, Sharp and Panasonic.
When shopping online for ink cartridges it is important to be clear about what you as a customer expect in terms of after sales service. Cheap ink cartridges can come at a cost, quality is not cheap. People often under estimate the importance of quality ink cartridges and the supplier they buy from. There are a range of suppliers online ranging from ridiculously cheap to ridiculously expensive. At Inkjet Online we put service and quality first. You need to be sure you are buying the best quality, there’s nothing worse than finding you have paid good money for poor quality ink cartridges let alone the hassle of having to find another supplier at short notice. When something goes wrong as things occasionally do you need to know that the people you purchased your products from have the time to solve your issue. At Inkjet Online that’s exactly what we do, service and quality. This is critical if the supplier is on the other side of the continent! We aim to make a living not a killing so our prices will always be great, we are not into the philosophy of charging as much as the market can bear. When you browse our site you will see we put allot of effort into supplying the customer with all the information we possibly can about the ink cartridge they are buying as well as that we back it up with personal service. If you have an issue with a product you have purchased from us we deal with it straight away. We never charge you without the products in stock. You can expect the order to be delivered next day. We are not drop shippers. When you buy from us you get it from us.
How long will an ink cartridge last.
This question is almost impossible to answer - What inkjet printer do you have, what printer settings are you using, what paper type are you printing on, how much ink do the cartridges hold, how much of the page is covered by image, how much of the image has deep rich colours (light colours can use less ink), how much of the image is actually printed as any white for instance, like clouds in the sky, require no ink at all. Most manufacturers should supply an estimate of number of pages you will get from an ink cartridge at 5% coverage using particular settings on particular paper type. This is the best way to measure a printers ink cartridge performance. As long as all the manufacturers use the same scale as just described a consumer can see that one printer will produce X number of sheets verses Y printer at the same level of use. Known as Ink Yield or Page Yield if a manufacturer doesn’t supply it clearly on their sales material I wouldn't buy it.
Before you buy a printer.
Always, always check the cost of the ink cartridges. We hear it all the time, "I paid less for the printer!" and our prices are lower than most. They have their place but my general advice is don't buy a cheap inkjet printer unless you only need it for small amounts of printing occasionally, only then do they make sense. If you are wanting to use your inkjet printer regularly you need to do some research. As a guide look for printers near or over $100, make sure that they have individual ink cartridges for each ink colour. Make sure high quality generic ink cartridges are available if you want to save even more. The more printing you do and the greater the quality you hope to get from your printer the more you should be looking to pay. Figure out the most you want to pay, find a model that suits you within that budget and then ring around for best prices. It’s the only way. If you have kids printing school work etc I suggest you set the printer to draft mode. This means that all those wasted homework prints or prints off the internet are done with the minimal ink possible. When you need to print the final edition you can manually set it to print at the appropriate quality settings. Also buy quality paper. The paper you print on can make a big difference to how much time and prints you use trying to get a good looking print. Poor quality paper will also cause feed issues and leave paper dust through the machine. Paper dust can block up the print head, get into sensors and cause errors. Find out about refilling. Refilling ink cartridges can be difficult but the right ink cartridges can be incredibly easy to refill. This is the single most cost effective way to run your printer and save on ink but it comes with its own issues and definite risks. When you buy a genuine or high quality generic ink cartridge you are getting something that is brand new or has been professionally remanufactured. When you refill, whether you do it yourself or pay for someone to refill it you are refilling a second hand product that has questionable life left in it. A refilled cartridge will not last forever, they will fail at some stage. When a cartridge fails it can cause a real mess. Refill failure rates are higher for multiple complicated reasons. Quality complaints are higher for multiple complicated reasons and we hear far more stories of damage to inkjet printers as a result of using refilled cartridges. So if you are going to refill be very sure you do it right, read the instructions carefully. We love the saying 'If all else fails read the manual' People often dive into refilling without putting some thought into it and reading the instructions twice. Make sure the cartridge is not leaking when you put it in your machine. It’s always been my advice to run a set of brand new genuine ink cartridges for every few uses of generic ink cartridges, being refilled or not. This acts a cleaning system ensuring the print head is kept in excellent order.
Are generic cartridges much cheaper than genuine?
This is a little more complicated than stating Generic $ verses Genuine $. There are many brands of generic ink cartridges. There is an enormous amount of suspect quality products out there at very low prices. In some cases a cheap generic ink cartridge might only be a couple of dollars verses $40 or more for the genuine. In most situations I believe its not worth the savings when buying the cheapest brand of generic ink cartridge. You risk damaging your machine. As always you get what you pay for. We only stock high quality generic ink cartridges that we can depend on. Customers vote with their feet. They won’t come back if ink cartridges we sell lets them down, we want them to come back. The cost of Genuine cartridges are continually coming down. I believe the genuine manufacturers are trying to compete with the generics. This depends on the Aussie dollar as all these genuine products are imported so if it the dollar drops they will shoot up. We don't stock a generic version of every genuine ink cartridge that we stock. Where the price difference is not significant or we can't guarantee reliability we see no point. There is an undeniable difference between generic and genuine. The genuine inks are the best option if you can afford it. They are the highest quality product you can put in your machine. Different manufacturers make different claims but our years of experience have taught us that you cannot beat genuine ink cartridges for quality and reliability.
Keeping your ink cartridge costs down.
Use your inkjet printer at least once a week, even if its only for a tiny bit of printing like a test page. Less use than this may result in blocked print heads. You will then loose large amounts of ink doing print head cleaning.
Buy an inkjet printer with individual ink cartridges for each colour. These machines have build in print heads so more care is required as the print head must last the life of the machine but the savings can be tremendous. If you buy ink cartridges that have all colours in one container you may be disposing of unused ink as the printer will stop printing as soon as only one of the ink colours run out.
Great savings can be made with high quality generic cartridges where available but only use the highest quality. You may save a few dollars now to lose more later. If you are going to use generic ink cartridges it’s my advice to run genuine ink cartridges for every few sets of generics you use. The higher the quality of the generic cartridges the less this is necessary. The genuine ink cartridges act as a cleaning mechanism while you are using them.
The next option is refilling, somewhat more difficult, complicated and prone to many more failures but the savings jump up again and in some cases can bring the cost per ink cartridge down to a couple of dollars.
Set your printer to Draft mode by default. This will reduce ink usage dramatically. Your printer may not have these settings, not all printers have draft mode. Generally the more expensive the printer the more settings you will get. Draft mode on some of the average and better Canon models is pretty good quality anyway. You can set this up by clicking START button SETTINGS >> PRINTERS, right click on your printer and select PROPERTIES. From there you need to find PRINTING PREFERENCES or similarly named. This will open the print driver setup screen. From here you need to find PRINT QUALITY or similar and select DRAFT, FAST or ECONOMY or whatever your model calls it. The method of doing this can be somewhat different between all the brands and even between models. Take these instruction generally and you should be right.
Inkjet Printing
Occasionally we come across people who aren't sure whether they have a laser or inkjet printer. For us this is always a wakeup call. Not everyone knows or wants to know, what’s going on inside their inkjet printer. This lack of knowledge causes a real void in understanding the causes of various issues they experience. A general understanding of the processes is really important to get good reliable results from your inkjet printer. The following is a general outline of what inkjet printing is and how it works.
When you create a document on your computer, like a Word document, the intention will most likely be to print it out. Getting the image you see on the screen onto paper is an incredible multistep process.
When you first setup your inkjet printer you would have had to install a print driver. The print driver allows you interact with your printer, cleaning print heads, aligning images, setting default settings. It is also a translator between your software like MS Word and the printer itself. The print driver converts the Word document into another language that the printer can understand. A little like painting by numbers the original image is broken down into information that can be reproduced by the printer on paper. This process is often called rasterisation. When you click the print button you are presented with a basic Microsoft print page, to click print from here will print your document using the default or preset settings in your printer driver. From this basic window you can click on the Properties button to be taken to the printer driver setup page. Here you can change those default/preset print driver settings. You are able to inform the print driver of extra details it may need to produce the best job possible. It might be the type of paper you are printing on or the print quality you require. It might be the size of the paper or borderless printing or even the image type, photos, clipart or text.
The print driver controls 2 basic areas in your printer. Physical settings and image settings.
Physically or mechanically it will choose the right paper tray, make the print the right size and in the right position. There are many settings like these that differ between machines.
The image settings relate to your choice of paper and print quality.
The type of paper you choose has a direct and critical effect on the quality you will get out of your inkjet printer. Plain paper is very absorbent, when ink hits plain paper the liquid droplet soaks in and spreads. Because of this when you select plain paper the print driver reduces the amount of ink hitting the page to reduce the blurring effect created by the spreading ink. To get a better image manufacturers have created paper that has been specially coated. This coating catches the ink droplet and holds it with little spreading. When you select photo or coated paper the printer driver will adjust to suit. This means that the print driver can increase the amount of ink and the number of ink droplets it applies. This gives deeper, richer, smoother colours much more favourable in printing photos and brochures. The use of coated papers also results in sharper edges to text and line work.
You can also choose different print qualities usually described like Draft, Standard and High. Increasing the print quality instructs the print driver to apply more dots or droplets. The number of droplets per square inch is known as DPI. Higher DPI allows the printer to create images in greater detail. Using the paint by numbers example an image with low DPI would only have a few numbers/spaces on the canvas to colour in. You’re not going to get a great looking mountain range with low DPI. Increase the DPI and you increase the number of spaces increasing the detail in the final painting.
You may also be able to select between text, graphics or photos. These settings will effect things like edge enhancement in text based documents. Vibrant consistent colours in solid blocks of colour in graphics like presentations with clipart or boxes and line drawings. Photos need smoother colour transitions with different contrast enhancement.
All this means making the right selection before printing is critical to good print quality.
The type of ink your printer uses also plays a significant role in print quality and problems you may be experiencing. There are 2 types of ink. Pigment and Dye based. Both having different properties and attractions. It’s worth understanding the differences as this will effect which machine you choose to buy. As technology improves the differences between them has reduced.
Dye based inks can create more vibrant accurate colour and are generally cheaper to make and so buy than pigment inks. Dye based inks are more prone to soaking and spreading on plain papers. Dye based inks may be faster to fade due to small particle size, think of the effect of chemicals and the sun on a grain of sand verses a small stone, dye verses pigment (the pigment ink being bigger particles). The bigger particle lasts longer due to its size. The dye molecule is so small it can be broken down chemically in acidic environments. This should be considered when you want to keep your prints a long time. Although manufactures that use dye based inks advertise long archival properties it is only when printed on their own paper. Dye based inks are less water resistant than pigments making them susceptible to smudging. Canon and HP generally use dye based inks however Canon use a combination of dye and pigment in a black to achieve best results. The carrier in Pigment inks referred to as resin binds the particles to the printed surface better than the dye carrier making pigment printed images more durable than dye based ink prints. The resin carrier also protects the pigment from chemical and light based damage. Due to the larger particle size pigmented ink may cause more blockages in print heads than dye based ink. Epson generally use pigments inks in their machines.
The final item I will cover is the type of print head. Not something a general user may think they need to know about. All print heads create an image by shooting tiny droplets of ink out of nozzles finer than a human hair onto the material to be printed. There are 2 types of print head that use 2 different ways of doing this. Thermal and Piezo.
Thermal print heads use a tiny electrical element on the side of the ink nozzle. The tiny element heats the ink at a tiny spot until it turns into a gas bubble. The bubble forces out a droplet of ink. Capillary action draws more ink into the nozzle to repeat the process. This happens at mind blowing speed. Thermal print heads have generally been capable of making smaller more variable sized droplets than Piezo print heads but things are changing. Due to the heating element thermal print heads are more susceptible to damage especially if ink runs out while printing. Ink also acts as a coolant to protect the thermal head from this.
Piezo print heads use a flexible wall in the inkjet nozzle. Generally made from a special crystal that flexes when a charge is past across it the flexing nozzle wall reduces the space or volume in the nozzle displacing the ink from it. As in the thermal print head capillary action draws ink back into the nozzle when it returns to normal shape.
I hope you gained some insight into the inkjet printing machines and processes.
Thanks for reading.
David Maidment
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Just a few
Thank you for delivering my order so promptly - most impressed!
QUEENSLAND
Hi David, thank you for your fast response, I really appreciate it, you display great customer service.
NEW SOUTH WALES
Thanks for your prompt service David. Your prices are very reasonable.
VICTORIA
Thank you so much - it's nice to see that someone else values customer service :-) I'm glad to have found you online - we'll be using your services again in the future.
QUEENSLAND
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