Stolen from Wiki (I'm stuck on lazy )
Small inkjet printers as being used in offices or at home, all use aqueous inks based on a mixture of water, glycol and some dyes or pigments. These inks are inexpensive to manufacture, but are difficult to control on the surface of media and therefore require often specially coated media. Aqueous inks are mainly being used in printers with disposable, so-called thermal, inkjet heads, as these heads require water in order to perform.
In professional wide format printers, a much wider range of inks is in use currently. Most of these inks require piezo inkjet heads:
In solvent inks, VOCs are the main ingredient. Advantage of these inks is that they are very inexpensive and enable printing on uncoated vinyl substrates, which are used a lot in advertising for billboards and fleet graphics.
UV-curable inks consist mainly of acrylic monomers with an initiator package. After printing, the ink has to be cured by a high dose of UV-light. The advantage of UV-curable inks is that they "dry" as soon as they are cured, they can be printed on a wide range of uncoated substrates and make a very robust image. Disadvantages is that they are more expensive, require expensive curing modules in the printer and the cured ink has a significant volume and so give a slight relief on the surface.
Dye sublimation inks contain special sublimation dyes and are used to print directly or indirectly on fabrics that consist of a high percentage of polyester fibres. In a heating step the dyes sublimate into the fibers and create an image with strong color and good durability.
wiki linky on printers my Lexmark uses a solvent based ink so the real heavy (high settings ) pictures come out wet , but they evaporate and dry to a nice finish when done ... i can even spill coffee on them and they dont smear or discolour normally . my pics come out like or very near photo store quality .
