What Is the Development Process of Ink Cartridges?

Earlier we learned about two ways to extend the life of printer ink cartridges, namely fake ink replacement and ink refilling. This article mainly explains the development of ink cartridges.

From the initial multi-color integration to the subsequent separation of black and color, and finally to the current separation of monochrome, all this has witnessed the gradual development of HP ink cartridges from single to multiple.

The original ink cartridges used a multi-color integrated design, that is, multiple colors are integrated in one ink cartridge. The biggest disadvantage of this kind of ink cartridge is its low utilization rate of ink. Because multiple colors exist in one ink cartridge, as long as one color of ink is used up, the entire ink cartridge must be scrapped, even if the other colors in the ink cartridge have not been used up.

The entire ink cartridge needs to be scrapped when one color is used up, which not only brings more unnecessary investment to the user, but also causes serious ink pollution problems. Because scrapped ink cartridges often contain other colors of ink that have not been used up, and a drop of ink can pollute tens of cubic meters of water. In order to improve the utilization of ink cartridges and reduce pollution as much as possible, the ink cartridges have gradually transitioned from the original multi-color integration to the separate structure of black ink and color ink.

The main reason for using this combination of ink cartridges is that printing black and white documents requires a large amount of black ink to be consumed separately, which leads to rapid consumption of black cartridge ink. Once the black ink is exhausted, the entire ink cartridge will be scrapped, so stripping out the black ink separately should be considered an inevitable development of the ink cartridge.

At this stage of the development of ink cartridges, it should be said that there have been very positive developments in terms of utilization and environmental protection. However, since the color ink cartridge is still composed of multiple colors, the rapid consumption of one color will still cause the entire color ink cartridge to be scrapped. Therefore, the further subdivision of color ink cartridges into multiple individual ink cartridges seems to be an inevitable trend for the next development of ink cartridges.

In fact, this speculation was finally confirmed to be correct. This can be seen from the new products of the two major inkjet printing giants Epson and HP. In its new ME series, Epson abandoned the matching mode of black and color ink cartridges used in the past, and replaced it with a combination of multiple monochrome ink cartridges and color ink cartridges.

The same situation happened to HP. HP's new products with SPT's new printing technology all use multiple monochrome ink cartridge designs. The use of HP 123 black ink cartridge can accurately allow each monochrome ink cartridge to be replaced after use, without the replacement of one color causing the entire ink cartridge to be scrapped. 

The development of ink cartridges to this model should be in compliance with demand. It is the inevitable result of the development.