In 1979 an HP scientist noticed his percolator made coffee with no moving parts, just a heater that moved water with thermal energy.
In a flash of scientific insight, an idea was born: heat could move and place ink on a piece of paper. Good-bye dot matrix, hello inkjet printing. And the way we print pretty much everything was forever changed.
HP Ink specialists
The HP ink chemists and scientists, with a combined total of over 500 years experience, have introduced more than 100 new inks over the past 20 years.
That figure becomes even more impressive when you consider that it takes 3 to 5 years and up to 1,000 prototype formulas to perfect each new ink.
All inks are subjected to more than 20 different tests for purity and more than 50 different tests for attributes such as water resistance, fade resistance and color accuracy. Why? Because there’s very little margin for error:
Impurities as small as 0.001% can reduce image quality and clog printheads.
The naked eye notices dot placement errors as little as 4/10,000 of an inch which can produce inadequate print results.
What's going on in your cartridge
Every time you click “Print,” you set in motion a complex chain of events. Inside each HP inkjet cartridge, an integrated circuit routes instructions to about 500 ink nozzles, each about one-third the width of a human hair.
As a result, pulses of energy create a superheated vapor bubble that forces a microscopic ink droplet through the nozzle and onto the page at roughly 50 kilometers per hour (31 miles per hour). This happens up to 36,000 times every second.
Sure it sounds like a breeze, but consider this: Placing such tiny ink drops accurately is like standing at the top of a 30-story building and dropping a nickel into a bucket on the sidewalk below.
Creating picture perfect inks
HP scientists carefully select specific dye chemistry combinations to deliver the best image quality, image permanence and durability. Inkjet print cartridges typically contain one of two types of inks:
Versatile inks: Highly concentrated “versatile” inks are designed for optimal performance on plain paper and select photo papers.
Photo inks: Low concentration “photo” inks produce subtle pale and pastel color dots, reducing graininess. Primarily for photo papers.
When versatile and photo inks are combined, the printing system is able to produce a broad range of colors for natural looking skin tones, accurate color reproduction, and virtually grain-free images.
Original HP Vivera inks deliver unique colors, taking the available color gamut to a new level with 20% more darker shades and up to 72.9 million possible color combinations for more realistic transitions for life-like color prints. See the whole Vivera story.
Vivid black and white
Many HP photo inkjet printers support the HP family of gray photo inks including the HP 59 Gray Photo inkjet print cartridge and the HP 100 and HP 102 Gray Photo inkjet print cartridges with Vivera ink. Each cartridge contains two shades of gray ink—light gray and dark gray—and a new photo black ink.
The gray and black photo inks are developed from HP dyes intricately blended to provide an extensive grayscale spectrum—from white tones to light, medium, and dark grays—to deep photo blacks. Each of the three inks is designed to effectively intermix with the other two—enabling HP printers to deliver seamless, essentially grain-free grayscales.
Click here for more about black and white photo printing.
Unmatched reliability
And consider the facts behind Original HP inkjet cartridges vs. remanufactured toner or refilled ink cartridges:
Refilled cartridges have a better than 1 in 4 chance of being dead-on-arrival or failing prematurely while Original HP had zero failures right out of the box.**
Original HP inkjet print cartridges printed 50% more pages than refill brands.**
For facts about the importance of paper to your printing, click here.
*Based on Wilhelm Imaging Research, Inc., using HP Vivera inks on HP Premium Plus Photo Paper **Based on an April 2007 Cartridge Reliability Study by QualityLogic, Inc. and commissioned by HP. Testing performed on HP 96, HP 97, HP 56 and HP 57 inkjet print cartridges. Individual results may vary. Click here for more details.
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