Difference between Printer Toner Cartridges and Ink Cartridges

Author: absolutetoner | Posted: 19.06.2012

Toner cartridge and ink cartridge are two of the most important requirements of printers. In the present day world, almost all the offices and homes are featured with computers and the accessories related to that. Printer is one of such accessories, which are widely used by most the people all over the world since, it helps the system work efficiently. In spite of being the must-haves of a printer, there are a few differences between the printer toner cartridges and the ink cartridges. To understand those basic differences, first we need to have a clear concept of these two products.

First, let’s know about a toner cartridge. Let us find out what it is. A toner cartridge is nothing but a cartridge of toner, which is a powder that is used in photocopiers or laser printers. This helps in the formation of the images and the text on the print paper. Previously, it used to be available in the form of carbon powder.

However, later a polymer was blended with the carbon so as to improvise the print quality. The fuser’s heat melts the toner particles, which in turn, makes them, cling to the print paper. On the other hand, an ink cartridge is a cartridge of ink that is considered to be a replaceable entity of an ink jet printer. Such kind of printers contains ink, which gets spread on the print paper while it performs the printing job. The ink jet printers necessitate liquid ink. At times, the ink used in printer cartridges are oil based. Mostly, it is water based though. Each and every ink cartridge is featured with one or more ink reservoirs, which are partitioned from each other.



Now, let us check out how do the printer toner cartridges differ from printer ink cartridges. Following are some of the most well known differences among the two:

•First, the toner, being a dry ink, the cartridges of toner contain dry inks whereas, the ink cartridges are featured with liquid ink.

•Secondly, the ink cartridges for printers are quite cheaper than the toner cartridges.

•Thirdly, in spite of being cheaper as far as their price is concerned, the cartridges of toners provide quite better quality page yield than the one provided by the cartridges of ink.

•Fourthly, when we consider the speed, a toner cartridge is believed to speed up the process of printing much more than it can be done by an ink cartridge. This difference in the pace of the printing process is due to the incorporation of the technology of refined printhead in the laser printers.

•The last but not the least, the major difference between printer toner cartridges and printer ink cartridges is the variation in the print quality. The toner cartridges, which are even, called by the name of the laser cartridges make the quality of the printed image a bit better than the cartridges of ink provides. The difference in quality is not much large though.



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