Inkjet printers operate by propelling droplets of ink onto paper or other media. Inkjet printers are the most commonly used printers today due to their low cost, high quality of output, ease of use, and capability of printing in black and colors.

Address printers use the same technology used in your office to print from your computer. The difference is that inkjet printers used for addressing have two distinct differences: A fast and reliable paper feeding system and faster propelling of the ink droplets. Those two keys differences separate your office printer from an inkjet printer designed for printing addresses on to mail pieces of all kinds.

Methods of Applying Ink Using Tabletop Inkjet Printers
Virtually all tabletop inkjet addressing printers use Hewlett Packard ink jet cartridges. The cartridges are designed to be used up and replaced. Many cartridge manufacturers will pay for used, empty cartridges and offer remanufactured cartridges along with new ones. The two methods for applying ink are by “fixed head” and “shuttlehead”. Fixed head printers pass the material under the print heads while keeping the ink cartridges stationary. Fixed heads allow for faster processing but have the drawback of limiting the coverage of printing to the one-half inch space below the ink cartridge. Manufacturers of fixed head printers such as Bryce, Secap, Pitney Bowes, Rena, Hasler and others have overcome the limited coverage areas of just one cartridge by using three, six, or up to nine cartridges to dramatically increase the coverage area. Shuttlehead printers can cover the entire surface of a mail piece, virtually corner to corner, with postal indicia, return address, calls to action etc.

Methods of Applying Ink for Production Printers
Production printers generally use a bladder-type ink reservoir to hold the ink that the inkjet printing processes uses to apply the ink top the mail piece. Production printers have been thought of as address printers with a production rate of 25,000 mail pieces per hour. Typically, production models were console models of print heads added to the top of a large processing base. Increasingly, manufacturers such as Secap, Rena, Pitney Bowes, Hasler and others are providing tabletop style production printers in consideration of space saving and the lower cost of production.