New age Ink tank color printers best suited for startups and small businesses

By Rahul Sethi

Continuous Inkjet printing or Ink-tank based printing is an amazing piece of technology. It was developed back in 1867 to record telegraph signals and later used in large printing machines – the size of rooms and buildings. But it was never scaled down to home and office printing without a good set of problems and limited printing options, until recently.

Traditional business requirements are mostly text document printing and small businesses rely on Laser printers for that, owing to their speed and reliability. But for color printing the same technology gets at least three-times more expensive to own. This is why Inkjet printers are preferred. They are cheaper and need one-tenth the electric power to run. Most importantly, they can output better color print quality. All they need is a continuous supply of cartridges. A cartridge is the lifeline of an Inkjet printer, a frequent and costly replacement. Forged in a small cassette-like enclosure, it contains the ink and tiny nozzles (called print head) and runs the breadth of the paper while printing.

Whereas the print head can last for several thousand pages, there isn’t enough room on the cartridge for that much ink. Even if it is swollen to make room, it gets heavier and would slow down the printing process. Consequently, it runs empty a bit too soon.

To solve this problem, ink-tank design was incorporated. An ink reservoir is created outside, with a mechanism to push the ink through tiny tubes to the print head. This way a printer can keep over 25 times more ink and still print fast. And just the ink needs to be replaced when it runs empty.

Due to various factors, print quality of the tank-based printer hasn’t been as good as the cartridge-based inkjet. Features like automatic two-sided printing or support for various types of paper weren’t available, and issues with the ink delivery system required frequent maintenance.

But that has changed with new cartridge and print head technologies. A few new products offer user-replaceable print heads that reduce the need for servicing. The G-series from Canon, GT-series from HP and select latest models in the Epson L-series all use ink-tanks studded to their printer bodies and yet, deliver fabulous color prints at a throwaway price.

Their printing cost is practically at least one-fourth of a conventional inkjet. But for it to create a significant impact on your savings, your monthly print volume should be close to the maximum the printer can handle (most printers have a monthly duty cycle of 5,000-15,000 pages). As close as possible, but not beyond.

If a normal printer has a CPP (cost per page) of Rs 4, an ink tank based printer brings it down to Re 1. Over a month, assuming 5,000-page print volume, the latter saves about Rs 15,000. That’s almost the cost of the printer.

Surprisingly, the photo quality on these are very close to the dedicated photo printers, so much that buying the latter no longer makes sense, unless the monthly volume is way over 10,000 pages. They support a variety of page types now, including every kind of photo paper from small popular sizes to A4, full page borderless prints.

This is quite the scenario, which, when compared to the home-use case, reveals that ink tank based printers make more sense for a business setup with 2-10 people. They are made for bulk color printing for a variety of businesses like a media house, studio, photo shop, or even an art student who prints rigorously in color on a regular basis.

For small office printing needs ink tank based printers brings in huge cost savings on ink cartridges, that you would be replacing every few thousand pages on a usual inkjet printer.

The author is a technology writer at Techmagnifier. Apart from writing on technology, he dwells on photography and music.