Industrial Inkjet Inks FAQ

We have a team of Application Support chemists experienced in determining the best match of customer application requirements to our best inks. These professionals work with your product samples, gain an understanding of your and your customer’s code and production environment, then simulate those variables in our Application Labs to test and validate the best ink.

Videojet has a market leading portfolio of inks, expanded from just a few in 1972, to over 340 different application and printer-unique inks today. These inks span all relevant small and large character industrial inkjet technologies. They include a wide range of performance capabilities across the range of color, code durability, environmental conditions and printer types, and include environmentally benign alternatives.

Videojet has over 40 years of ink and fluid technology experience developing inks that solve tough application challenges, with aerospace, automotive, beverage, building materials, dairy, fresh and frozen food, pharmaceutical, personal care and wire and cable industry-specific ink formulations.

Inks are designed to penetrate surface contamination such as moisture on beverage bottles, mold release compounds on blow molded plastic bottles and oil on metal stampings and extrusions. Specialized inks have been designed to be resistant to solvents encountered in electronic component or mil-spec applications, or to resist product contents spillage that may occur in product manufacturing or during everyday consumer use. Some inks are designed to dry quickly and be compatible with high speed web or film packaging production lines. Some inks are formulated and manufactured in our food grade production plant for direct imaging on food items. Other inks have been developed to suit product decoration, and optimized for linear and 2-D bar coding. Some inks have been designed to provide good light fastness to withstand prolonged exposure to direct sunlight, and others to change color to show evidence of a cooking retort process.

This is just a small sample of how our inks are used. Videojet has provided solutions to many thousands of customers in hundreds of different industries around the world.

Engaging our Application Support chemists is one of the best ways to find the right ink that meets the needs of your specific application and those of your customers. For this reason, choosing the best ink starts with us asking you a few questions such as:

. What is the material composition of your product? Is it glass, metal, plastic, etc.? If plastic, what type of plastic? HDPE, LDPE, PE, PP, etc.?
. How fast does this ink need to dry? More specifically, what first touches the code and under how much pressure and heat?
. In what condition is your product just prior to coding? Is it wet, oily, hot, cold, clean, etc.?
. What must the ink code withstand once printed onto your product? What type of product liquids or solvents are involved in your or your customer’s process (water, caustic, oil, alcohol, heat, sunlight, steam, etc.)?
. What adhesion properties do you need or, in other words, how well and for how long do you need the code to stick to your product through the required lifecycle of the code? Do you need the code to be removable, etc.?

Depending on the printer family selected, some of our color range includes black and high contrast white, yellow, blue and red. Also orange, green, brown, purple, pink, gray and magenta are available. We also offer invisible inks that can be seen with UV light and inks that change color when subjected to cooking processes. Not all colors are available for every printer model. Please see your Videojet representative for more information.

Safety Data Sheets for Videojet fluids are conveniently available for you to download in Adobe® Acrobat® Reader™ format by clicking here.