The Different Types Of Inks For Your Prints

By Author: Brent Durell
Total Articles: 172
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It is common and basic knowledge that for any type of printing activity, whether it is with you using your home printer or a Ft Worth printer doing commercial printing, ink is one of the fundamental and crucial tool that is used. Without ink, there would practically be no printing techniques left, and almost every printer in homes around the world would be rendered useless. With such a seemingly basic substance, it can be very surprising to learn that there are actually a lot behind the ink your DFW printer uses. And as a customer, it would be good to have a better understanding of the world that is ink.

There are two fundamental things that can be established about ink from mere observation alone. The first thing is that ink is usually in liquid form, and the second is that it is used to create images on different types of medium. Without any special type of equipment, inks are more often used in pens and markers for writing. With a printer or a special inking machine, however, ink can be used to print text and images on different medium such as paper, textile and plastics.

As a commercial printing customer, you ...
... would be more interested on the different types of ink and their uses in commercial printing. A simple method of classifying the different inks are simply to mention what type of printing technique they are used for, such as “offset printing inks” or “laser printing inks”. However, a more in-depth and thorough research would reveal that there are more classifications and types of inks than you have ever imagined.

For starters, inks can be grouped into two main groups depending on their use. The first group are the standard inks, and the second are the specialty inks. Discussing each of the inks included in each group would take an impractical amount of time, but you are not likely to need such extensive knowledge about printing inks, anyways. Just to give examples, standard printing inks may include heatset and non-heatset web offset ink, sheetfed ink, soybean based ink, and others, while specialty printing inks may include metallic inks, fluorescent ink, phosphorescent ink, and many others. The main difference between the two is that standard inks are used for more common printing jobs (thus, the name) while specialty inks may be used for specific purposes like security markings, printing on non-paper media, and others.

It is rare that you would need to specify a specific type of ink for your requested print jobs, because your Ft Worth printers would usually handle all of the technical aspects for you. Usually, a customer’s concerns on printing ink would be the period of time before the ink fades or whether the used ink is water-soluble and would be prone to smudging. The main point that DFW printers customers should get from this is that the ink is an integral part of the whole printing process. You are not likely to need any deep knowledge on the different aspects of inks, but nevertheless, it is good to know.