[SOLVED] Dielectric constant and loss tangent of HP photo paper

That is a good point. Some printers are apparently already available with "manual feed" where you put in one sheet of thicker material at a time for printing. Was wondering if anyone here have actual experience with a cheap printer that can do this (one less than $500).

For example there are a wide number of professional photo quality printers out there. For instance, an Epson Stylus Photo R1900 goes for around $350, and can print on thick plastics like compact disk faces!

Hi George137, thanks for sharing this quite informative research paper.

If the printer can print on CD than there is no problem to put a FR4 PCB and print directly on it conductive tracks!

luben111 said:

If the printer can print on CD than there is no problem to put a FR4 PCB and print directly on it conductive tracks!

Click to expand...

Yep, that's what I was thinking. But wonder if the print head can accept these special inks?

was hoping someone out there already did this experiment, and came up with an ink, a substrate, and a printer for cheap that lets you make solderable microwave prototypes!

Cabot states that the ink is compatible with Piezo (e.g. Dimatix, SE128, Dimatix DMC11610, Konica Minolta KM512MN) heads. We have Dimatix printer which is quite complex and expensive but I see that Konika Minolta KM512MN head is used in many ordinary printers. Until the head is piezo you can probably use it. I have some concerns that if I refill an old cartridge the silver ink could react with the existing traces of the old ink. I guess they sell the ink in small containers ready for refilling, seems that the only one way is we try how it works.

According to wikipedia:
"Piezoelectric/piezoelectric DOD inkjetMost commercial and industrial inkjet printers and some consumer printers (those produced by Epson) use a piezoelectric material in an ink-filled chamber behind each nozzle instead of a heating element. When a voltage is applied, the piezoelectric material changes shape, which generates a pressure pulse in the fluid forcing a droplet of ink from the nozzle. Piezoelectric (also called Piezo) inkjet allows a wider variety of inks than thermal inkjet as there is no requirement for a volatile component, and no issue with kogation, but the print heads are more expensive to manufacture due to the use of piezoelectric material (usually PZT, lead zirconium titanate). Piezo inkjet technology is often used on production lines to mark products - for instance the use-before date is often applied to products with this technique; in this application the head is stationary and the product moves past. Requirements of this application are a long service life, a relatively large gap between the print head and the substrate, and low operating cost. There is a drop-on-demand process, with software that directs the heads to apply between zero to eight droplets of ink per dot and only where needed. As of June 2009, the fastest cut-sheet inkjet printer on the market is the RISO ComColor 9050, which prints 146 USLetter and 150 A4 full-color pages per minute in both one-sided and two-sided printing modes.[4][5] Recent developments of the inkjet extend the operation from printing into manufacturing processes. The newest of these technologies is to deposit layers of plastic material as digital embossing over the top of printed works.[6]"\

Inkjet printer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I guess we should figure out which epson printers have this piezo head with enough resolution to get the job done.

---------- Post added at 10:46 ---------- Previous post was at 10:19 ----------

It does look like the R1900 epson might be the minimum printer that can do this. It has a resolution of 5760x1440 dpi, has the piezo head, have manual feed capability, and has a cd/dvd printing holder.

The cheaper epsons apparently do not have the manual feed, and are limited to thin paper.

My concern is that the epson print head is a permanent one. On some forums they compain about these heads clogging up more than the thermal type. So with this special ink, it may become a clogging nightmare?

About the resolution

The Dimatix printer uses very low number of nuzzles but the head can be rotated so if placed on small angle (couple degrees) the resolution becomes extremely high. Tracks near 10um can be printed without any problems. It takes ages to print single A4 format sheet. I don't think it's so easy to remake some printer and to rotate the head to get higher resolution - in addition to the mechanical efforts it will require special software.

Inkjet printers offer resolution of >=300 dpi which is more than enough for our needs. The best candidate could be some printer bought from eBay on reasonable price which could be remade without any worries to accept directly PCB FR4. I suspect that heads with extremely high resolution can yield problems - the silver ink has nano particles which could clog the head chambers.

One interesting link - Extract from "Ink-jet fabrication of electronic components"

There are all sorts of papers out there on this topic. I will wade thru them when I get a chance.

Here is a guy using an epson R800 for photoresist. He alludes to the fact that you could also print conductive inks. But clearly you can run a pcb thru it (with a holder modification).

pcbprt - Experiments in inkjet PCB printing

hi all, its so informative for me the discussion carried out over here.