Unlike conventional office printers, whose ink comes from expensive ink cartridges or toner cartridges, devices with built-in, refillable ink tanks coat paper extremely cheaply. The higher acquisition costs are quickly amortized: while you would otherwise have to buy cartridges after a few hundred printed pages, the ink supplied with the tank models is sufficient for many thousands of pages. Even high-volume printers can get by with this for a long time.
At least for the primary colors, most ink tank printers work with inks that only contain liquid dyes – so-called dye inks. These are well suited for mixed colors, for example when printing color photos, but quickly fade in the sun. Our test devices, the Canon Maxify GX4050 and Epson EcoTank ET-5170, are all filled with pigment inks. These inks contain solid color particles that stay on the paper surface and cover well. Only the liquid part of the ink penetrates the paper fibers.
Pigment inks are harder to mix, but are very light-stable and document-proof – important requirements for office printers. We test the light stability in a daylight simulator, which normally exposes the print samples for 100 hours, which corresponds to about a year in sunlight behind window glass. We even irradiated the samples of our test printers for 200 hours. Only then did the yellow of the Epson ink give way slightly, we could not observe any fading in the Canon sample.
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