Solid ink

When solid ink printers or solid ink printers liquefied wax drops on the paper or other media by the so-called solid ink process by heat applied (see also Color Sticks ). The solid ink printing process was developed by Tektronix, after buying this technology (including the word mark Phaser ®) 1999 by Xerox Xerox is now the patent holder and the only manufacturer to offer this technology. The process is there in some models of the series Phaser, WorkCentre and ColorQube used.

Advantages of a solid ink printer are:

• The printers are characterized typically by rich, true-color and lightfast colors, ( at high pressure conditions) low printing costs and ease of maintenance.
• The print quality is almost independent of the pressure medium. Printing on OHP transparencies particularly brilliant results.
• The Color sticks are unlike toner nontoxic and can be loaded with your bare hands when filling there is no dust pollution.
• In relation to the life of a comparable laser printer to fall about 80 percent less waste, since The wax blocks are supplied in blister packs,
• In Farbnachfüllung no toner cartridges need to be changed,
• The remaining non-toxic wax, the melt flow which can be disposed of with household waste.

Whenever you turn on or turn on the spray nozzles to be emptied, which greatly increases the ink consumption. After switching are ten to twenty minutes warm-up time to first print not uncommon. To get around this, the devices are left rather turned on, whereby the wax melt by continuous heating is always liquid in the printing unit, but this will cost the power consumption in standby mode is very high. Other disadvantages of the pressure principle are:

• The printouts are easily wetted with a transmitted by the maintenance unit to the drum release agent, as has the waxy solid ink repellent effect. The color of markers therefore runs off and pen slip over the printouts without that they roll. Therefore, it is hardly possible to supplement printouts with handwritten notes.
• No longer required printouts can not be a concept paper in conventional laser printers or solid ink printers use as the solid ink melts in the fuser stations and significant pollution causes. For the same reason it is not feasible to thermally laminate printing.
• The pressure principle is particularly susceptible to clogging at the nozzles.
• The slots for solid ink cubes are relatively small, the filling is very simple, but for mass printing supervision to control the ink-backup is necessary.
• The maintenance unit is designed for a specific number of prints, the number of prints is stored on a chip, after exceeding the maximum number of print strikes the device to the maintenance unit is replaced.

The printers are mainly for commercial use in continuous use where the color fidelity, brilliance and low printing costs will be encouraged. You will otherwise be used mainly for proof- prints in prepress and in the advertising industry.