It appears there is a bit of discussion about what HP calls it’s material used by the Indigo. HP actually calls it ink but there is some controversy about that among the printing industry. George Alexander on Beyond-Print wrote a nice post about this subject and expressed his opinion on the subject. Mr. Alexander states…

In my opinion, HP Indigo devices do use toner—a liquid toner that HP Indigo calls ElectroInk. If you look up “liquid toner” in engineering reference books or online resources, you will find a definition that is a good description of ElectroInk. I can’t see any basis for claiming that ElectroInk is not liquid toner. Electrostatic forces attract the charged pigment particles in ElectroInk to the positions where they are required for image forming. That, to me, is what “toner” is.

He goes on to talk about how HP chooses not to use the word toner and how that could be considered deceptive marketing. HP’s term “ElectroInk” is trademarked and some even consider that to be a step in the deceptive direction because it “purposely” contains the word ink.



I thought I would ask the President of the printing company I work for, that owns and runs an Indigo, what he thought the material is considered. You can probably guess what he said… INK! This is what HP wishes for and has done some well as marketing it as.

Some wonder why this is such a big deal and I can’t blame you. That is exactly what peaked my own curiosity about the subject. Why do people really care what it is called? Isn’t the real issue how well it prints the image? It appears, from following the comments on the Print CEO Blog post ‘Does HP Indigo use “toner” or “ink”?’ people are really uneasy about the terminology and the possible deceptive marketing by HP.

I can see it from both perspectives but really do have to lean towards the side that is unhappy about the possible deception.  George Alexander makes another good point at the end of his post that this discussion could be a little overrated and really we need to “have a civilized discussion about what makes liquid toner better than dry toner in some situations and for some applications. Everyone would benefit from that.”

Now that is a discussion I look forward to reading.

Bookmarking:

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Printing, Graphic Design, Business, Industry News, Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.