Inkjet printing
Inkjet printing is a type of computer printing that recreates a digital image by propelling droplets of ink onto paper and plastic substrates.[1] Inkjet printers were the most commonly used type of printer in 2008,[2] and range from small inexpensive consumer models to expensive professional machines. By 2019, laser printers outsold inkjet printers by nearly a 2:1 ratio, 9.6% vs 5.1% of all computer peripherals.[3]
The concept of inkjet printing originated in the 20th century, and the technology was first extensively developed in the early 1950s. While working at Canon in Japan, Ichiro Endo suggested the idea for a "bubble jet" printer, while around the same time Jon Vaught at Hewlett-Packard (HP) was developing a similar idea.[4] In the late 1970s, inkjet printers that could reproduce digital images generated by computers were developed, mainly by Epson, HP and Canon. In the worldwide consumer market, four manufacturers account for the majority of inkjet printer sales: Canon, HP, Epson and Brother.[5]
In 1982, Robert Howard came up with the idea to produce a small color printing system that used piezos to spit drops of ink. He formed the company, R.H. (Robert Howard) Research (named Howtek, Inc. in Feb 1984), and developed the revolutionary technology that led to the Pixelmaster color printer with solid ink[6] using Thermojet technology. This technology consists of a tubular single nozzle acoustical wave drop generator invented originally by Steven Zoltan in 1972 with a glass nozzle and improved by the Howtek inkjet engineer in 1984 with a Tefzel molded nozzle to remove unwanted fluid frequencies.
The emerging ink jet material deposition market also uses inkjet technologies, typically printheads using piezoelectric crystals, to deposit materials directly on substrates.
The technology has been extended and the 'ink' can now also comprise solder paste in PCB assembly, or living cells,[7] for creating biosensors and for tissue engineering.[8]
Images produced on inkjet printers are sometimes sold under trade names such as Digigraph, Iris prints, giclée, and Cromalin.[9] Inkjet-printed fine art reproductions are commonly sold under such trade names to imply a higher-quality product and avoid association with everyday printing.
Application[edit]
Different materials are suitable for different types of printers.
PP: Polypropylene. It is a semi-crystalline thermoplastic plastic with high impact resistance, strong mechanical properties, resistance to various organic solvents and acid-base corrosion, and is widely used in industry. This kind of material belongs to common polymer materials. The UV ultraviolet laser printer is better. The UV laser printer is cold-processed. It can change the molecular structure of the surface of the material through the purple light of 355 nm wavelength, leaving a permanent mark and greener. Environmentally friendly and efficient.
Applicable printers: Domino Printing D-Series CO2 Laser, Markem Imaje SmartLase C150 and C350, etc.
OPP: Oriented polypropylene. The white point is a plastic bag, characterized by easy burning and softness. It is recommended to use a thermal transfer printer to print. The thermal transfer printer can achieve high-speed coding, and the effect is beautiful. It is very suitable for high-efficiency printing of plastic bags. In particular, it can be equipped with some rewinding and unwinding machines to achieve high-speed online assignment. The other is that the resolution is relatively high. If the variable two-dimensional code is printed, there will be a very good scanning recognition rate.
Applicable printers: Markem Imaje SmartDate X30/X45, Videojet 6330 and 6530 TTO printer, etc.
PET: Polyterephthalic plastic. PET is the abbreviation of English Polyethylene terephthalate, referred to as PET or PETE. Common in mineral water bottles, carbonated beverage bottles, etc., has now developed into the current beer bottles, edible oil bottles, condiment bottles. Pharmaceutical products, cosmetic bottles, etc., suitable for the coding equipment are small character inkjet printers and ultraviolet laser printers, widely used for small character inkjet printers.
Applicable printers: Domino Ax-Series Printer, CIJCOD S200+ Inkjet Printer, Markem Imaje 90-Series Printer, etc.
ABS: acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene copolymer. ABS resin is one of the five synthetic resins with impact resistance, heat resistance, low temperature resistance and chemical resistance. The electrical performance is excellent, and it has the characteristics of suitable processing, stable product size, good surface gloss, etc. It is easy to be coated and colored, and can also be subjected to secondary processing such as surface metallization, electroplating, welding, hot pressing and bonding. Widely used in machinery, automotive, electronic appliances, instrumentation, textile and construction industries, it is a very versatile thermoplastic engineering plastic. This kind of material uses laser jet printer to code more, because the application industry is different, so what type of laser printer is needed to carry out on-site proofing, compare the effect to judge.
Applicable printers: Videojet 3640/3350 CO2 Laser, Markem Imaje SmartLase C340, etc.
PVC: Polyvinyl chloride. It is a white powder with a fixed structure, the degree of branching is small, the relative density is about 1.4, the glass transition temperature is 77-90 °C, and the decomposition starts at about 170 °C. The stability to light and heat is poor, above 100 °C or over a long period of time. When exposed to sunlight, it will decompose to produce hydrogen chloride, and further autocatalyze decomposition, causing discoloration, and physical and mechanical properties are also rapidly declining. In practical applications, stabilizers must be added to improve the stability to heat and light.
PVC material is widely used in building materials, industrial products, daily necessities, floor leather, floor tiles, artificial leather, pipes, wire and cable, packaging film, bottles, foam materials, sealing materials, fibers and other aspects. These industries use a large number of inkjet printers. When selecting a printer to print, it is still necessary to perform proofing analysis on the product and select a better inkjet printer.
Applicable printers: Domino Ax-Series Printer, Videojet 1000-Series Printer, CIJCOD S200+ Inkjet Printer, etc.
Printer types[edit]
Professional models[edit]
In addition to the widely used small inkjet printers for home and office, there are professional inkjet printers, some for "page-width" format printing and many for wide format printing. Page-width format means that the print width ranges from about 8.5–37 in (22–94 cm). "Wide format" means print width ranging from 24" up to 15' (about 60 cm to 5m). The most common application of page-width printers is in printing high-volume business communications that do not need high-quality layout and color. Particularly with the addition of variable data technologies, the page-width printers are important in billing, tagging, and individualized catalogs and newspapers. The application of most wide format printers is in printing advertising graphics; a lower-volume application is printing of design documents by architects or engineers. But nowadays, there are inkjet printers for digital textile printing up to 64" wide with good high definition image of 1440×720 dpi.[43]
Another specialty application for inkjets is producing prepress color proofs for printing jobs created digitally. Such printers are designed to give accurate color rendition of how the final image will look (a "proof") when the job is finally produced on a large volume press such as a four-color offset lithography press. An example is an Iris printer, whose output is what the French term giclée was coined for.
The largest-volume supplier is Hewlett-Packard, which supplies over 90 percent of the market for printers for printing technical drawings. The major products in their Designjet series are the Designjet 500/800, the Designjet T Printer series (including the T1100 and T610), the Designjet 1050 and the Designjet 4000/4500. They also have the HP Designjet 5500, a six-color printer that is used especially for printing graphics as well as the new Designjet Z6100 which sits at the top of the HP Designjet range and features an eight color pigment ink system.
Epson, Kodak, and Canon also manufacture wide-format printers, sold in much smaller numbers than standard printers. Epson has a group of three Japanese companies around it that predominantly use Epson piezo printheads and inks: Mimaki, Roland, and Mutoh.
Scitex Digital Printing developed high-speed, variable-data, inkjet printers for production printing, but sold its profitable assets associated with the technology to Kodak in 2005 who now market the printers as Kodak Versamark VJ1000, VT3000, and VX5000 printing systems. These roll-fed printers can print at up to 305m per minute.
Professional high-volume inkjet printers are made by a range of companies. These printers can range in price from US$35,000 to $2 million. Carriage widths on these units can range from 54" to 192" (about 1.4 to 5 m), and ink technologies have tended toward solvent, eco-solvent, and UV-curing with a more recent focus toward water-based (aqueous) ink sets. Major applications where these printers are used are for outdoor settings for billboards, truck sides and truck curtains, building graphics and banners, while indoor displays include point-of-sales displays, backlit displays, exhibition graphics, and museum graphics.
The major suppliers for professional high-volume, wide- and grand-format printers include: EFI,[44] LexJet, Grapo, Inca, Durst, Océ, NUR (now part of Hewlett-Packard), Lüscher, VUTEk, Scitex Vision (now part of Hewlett-Packard), Mutoh, Mimaki, Roland DG, Seiko I Infotech, IQDEMY, Leggett and Platt, Agfa, Raster Printers, DGI and MacDermid ColorSpan (now part of Hewlett-Packard), swissqprint, SPGPrints (formerly Stork Prints), MS Printing Systems and Digital Media Warehouse.[45]
SOHO multifunction inkjet photo printers[edit]
SOHO multifunction inkjet printers for photo printing use up to 6 different inks:
Other uses[edit]
U.S. Patent 6,319,530 describes a "Method of photocopying an image onto an edible web for decorating iced baked goods". In other words, this invention enables one to inkjet print a food-grade color photograph on a birthday cake's surface. Many bakeries now carry these types of decorations, which are printable using edible inks and dedicated inkjet printers. Edible ink printing can be done using normal home use inkjet printers like Canon Bubble Jet printers with edible ink cartridges installed, and using rice paper or frosting sheets.
Inkjet printers and similar technologies are used in the production of many microscopic items. See Microelectromechanical systems.
Inkjet printers are used to form conductive traces for circuits, and color filters in LCD and plasma displays.
Inkjet printers, especially models produced by Dimatix (now part of Fujifilm), Xennia Technology and Pixdro, are in fairly common use in many labs around the world for developing alternative deposition methods that reduce consumption of expensive, rare, or problematic materials. These printers have been used in the printing of polymer, macromolecular, quantum dot, metallic nanoparticles, and carbon nanotubes. The applications of such printing methods include organic thin-film transistors, organic light emitting diodes, organic solar cells, and sensors.[55][56]
Inkjet technology is used in the emerging field of bioprinting. They are also used for the production of OLED displays.[57]