Used in a variety of printers, a printer ribbon is a cloth soaked in regular ink

Used in a variety of printers, a printer ribbon is a cloth soaked in regular ink or wax based inks that yields printouts. While printer ribbons are in lower demand now than they have been in past decades, there are still machines out there that require thermal printer ribbon, including thermal transfer printers and impact printers (dot matrix). The majority of today’s printers, however, use cartridges filled with liquid ink or toner powder instead. Thermal printers usually require ribbons that come in individual rolls, and are heated up while being pressed to paper to produce print outs. In terms of consistency, thermal ribbons are very similar to a sheet of wax paper, and come in a variety of colors. To ease the installation process, dot matrix or impact matrix printers typically arrive in cartridges, and work by impacting an ink soaked cloth ribbon with a print head to put small dots of ink on paper.