Inks

An ink is a liquid containing various pigments and/or dyes used for colouring a surface to render an image or text. Ink is used for drawing or writing with a pen or brush. Thicker inks, in a paste form, are used extensively in letterpress and lithographic printing. more...

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Types of ink

Early varieties of ink include Egyptian ink, various natural dyes made from metals, the husk or outer covering of nuts or seeds, and sea creatures like the squid (known as sepia). India ink is black and originated in Asia. Walnut ink and iron gall ink were made and used by many of the old masters to obtain ink for drawing, which over time has often faded to golden brown.

Pigmented inks

Pigmented inks contain other agents that ensure adhesion of the pigment to the surface and prevent it from being removed by mechanical abrasion. These materials are typically referred to as resins (in solvent-based inks) or binding agents (in water-based inks).

Pigmented inks are advantageous when printing on paper because the pigment stays on the surface of the paper. This is desirable because more ink on the surface of the paper means less ink needs to be used to create the same intensity of color.

Pigments are the main components of ink, containing the different colors. The size of the pigment is very important for the ability of diffuse in the solution inks. Qualities such as hue, saturation, and brightness are inherent in the ink, varying dependent on the source and type of pigment.

Dyes in inks

Dye-based inks are generally much stronger than pigment based inks and can produce more color of a given density per unit of mass. However, because dyes are dissolved in the liquid phase, they have a tendency to soak into paper, thus making the ink less efficient and also potentially allowing for the ink to bleed at the edges, producing poor quality printing.

To circumvent this problem, dye-based inks are made with solvents that dry rapidly or are used with quick-drying methods of printing, such as blowing hot air on the fresh print. Other methods to resolve this include harder paper sizing and more specialized paper coatings. The latter is particularly suited to inks that are used in non-industrial settings (and thus must conform to tighter toxicity and emission controls), such as inkjet printer inks, include coating the paper with a charged coating. If the dye has the opposite charge, then it is attracted to and retained by this coating, while the solvent soaks into the paper. Cellulose, the material that paper is made of, is also naturally charged, and so a compound that complexes with both the dye and the paper surface aids retention at the surface. Such a compound in common use in ink-jet printing inks is polyvinyl pyrrolidone.

Read more at Wikipedia.org

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