The printing technology where the cartridge is used.
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Laser. Laser printing uses a special light-sensitive drum and paint in the form of the smallest powder (toner): the laser marks certain areas of the drum, while the toner sticks to them, which is then transferred to paper. Such printing is considered optimal for business, educational and other similar documents: it is great for black and white materials, but poorly suitable for colour ones, and that's why most laser printers are made for black and white output type. One of the features of this type of cartridges is that the mentioned drum is included with the toner container — as a result, such components are quite expensive. However, this is compensated by the long life of the cartridge and, accordingly, the very low cost of each separate print.
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Inkjet. Inkjet technology involves the use of microscopic droplets of liquid ink that are "shot" from a printer nozzle onto paper. Unlike a laser, an inkjet cartridge is usually only a reservoir of ink and, accordingly, is inexpensive. Most printers of this type are colour, respectively, and cartridges can contain ink of different colours (there are also multi-colour models). Inkjet printing is well suited for coloured image printing, including photo quality, but the cost per sheet is quite high.
— Dot-Matrix. The principle of operation of dot matrix printers is that t
...he separate dots of the image are hit on paper using needles of the print head. The cartridge for such a printer is usually an ink ribbon with additional devices — it is through such a ribbon that each needle strikes. Dot matrix printing is the oldest printing technology that is used today; such printers are noisy, rather slow, and the image quality is poor. At the same time, it is quite enough to work with text information, and the cost of printing is also low; therefore dot-matrix devices are still in use — particularly, in official institutions for printing receipts and even documents on letterhead. Accordingly, cartridges for them are also found on the market — although quite rarely.
— Thermal sublimation. This printing technology is somewhat similar to the dot matrix described above — in particular, it also involves the use of an ink ribbon. However, in this case, unlike the dot matrix with needled print head, the heating elements are acting with a tape: they heat up the dye, which evaporates and transfers to the paper. Dye-sublimation printing provides high resolution and excellent colour reproduction characteristics, in addition, it allows you to adjust the colour rendering characteristics by changing the settings of the printer itself. On the other hand, it requires the use of special paper and is slow because the image is formed in several passes (usually four to three base colours plus a protective coating). Thereby, photo printers are the main area of application of this technology, and sublimation cartridges are often sold as kits that include not only the cartridges themselves, but also the printing paper.Estimated cartridge yield is the number of pages that can be printed without replacing the cartridge. The larger the value, the longer the cartridge will last, the more prints you can make with it. At the same time, it should be noted that we are talking about the approximate number of sheets. This is due to the fact that the resource is usually indicated according to a certain standard, which provides for an average rate of filling the page with ink during printing (about 5%). In fact, fill rate do not always correspond to the standard ones, which is why the actual yield of the cartridge may differ from the claimed one. Nevertheless, this indicator makes it possible to evaluate the stock of ink — both in a separate cartridge and in comparison to several models.
