EVOLUTION Ink Usage
EVOLUTION was completely designed by Digital Design in Cedar Grove, New Jersey. While in the design phase, we had the opportunity to look at the printhead driver that HP and our competitors use for the HP ink cartridges. The HP driver is great for their desktop printers, but we wanted one that would give us a better print distance and also result in more economical ink usage. Working from our almost 25 years experience in the ink jet printing industry, we developed a printhead driver that met our goals.
The table below shows that with the Digital Design driver, EVOLUTION produces a smaller droplet size which results in a 33% increase in ink droplets per
| Cartridge Volume | Droplet Size | Drops/Cartridge | Drop Velocity | Best Print | |
| HP Driver | 42ml | 34 Pico liter | 1,235,294,118 | 9M/sec | .059" |
| DDI Driver | 42ml | 23 Pico liter | 1,826,086,957 | 22.5M/sec | .125" |
The ink used by Digital Design is specially formulated, and is darker (more black) than the standard HP ink. This allowed the reduction in droplet size, while achieving a darker print at the same 300dpi resolution. Competitive printers using the HP ink would have to print at a resolution of 600dpi to meet the optical density of the ink used in EVOLUTION cartridges.
| Resolution | Character Size | Products/Min 1 Shift/Day | Message | Characters / Cartridge | Ink Change Time | Cost/Printed Message | |
| HP Ink | 300dpi | 1/2" | 10 | 10 Char. | 304,260 | 7.8 Days | $.00105 |
| HP Ink | 600dpi | 1/2" | 10 | 10 Char. | 152,130 | 3.9 Days | $.00201 |
| DDI Ink | 300dpi | 1/2" | 10 | 10 Char. | 449,775 | 11.5 Days | $.00146 |
The table above shows that the EVOLUTION cartridges last longer between ink changes, are slightly more expensive to run if compared to the grayer, less dense HP ink at 300dpi, and less expensive to operate if optical densities of both prints are near equal.