An aftermarket product is manufactured by a company that is not the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). MSE & Clover are two aftermarket manufacturers.
Impact Printer
An impact printer creates characters on paper by impact. It could use a printhead or some sort of printband. A printer ribbon is used to transfer a character, via the printhead to the paper. Common types of impact printers include dot matrix printers, typewriters, calculators and point-of-sale machines.
MICR
Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) technology uses magnetically charged ink or toner to print numbers and special characters on the bottom of checks or other financial transaction documents.
Troy Systems manufactures and sells MICR products. You can learn more about MICR at the Troy Systems website
OEM
OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer, a company like HP. When we refer to an OEM supply it would be a product made by the manufacturer who also makes the printer. OEMs are often confused with aftermarket manufactures.
Printer Supply Cross Reference
A printer supply cross reference is a tool to determine what supplies work in what printers, faxes, and other office machines. It may seem simple but there is more to it than meets the eye.
Printer manufacturers indicate what cartridges are recommended for each printer, but it is no secret that many alternative printer cartridges may work in a particular printer. You may choose to use different cartridges depending on price, availability or other factors.
However, understanding which cartridges work in which printers requires a reliable cross reference. Knowing you can use an alternate cartridge can save you money, but making the wrong choice can be costly. Here are some important factors you should be aware of:
- Printer models that look the same on the outside may require different supplies, but sometimes machines that are totally different can use the same supplies.
- Sometimes, otherwise-identical cartridge types are intentionally “keyed” (“keyed” cartridges) by making some small change to the physical package so you cannot interchange the supplies. It may be a magnetic strip or a tab positioned in a different location.
- Identical cartridges may contain microchips (“chipped” cartridges) that prevent them from being used in other machines. Many people aren’t aware of this practice.
- Some manufacturers buy print engines from other manufacturers. In this case, OEM printer supplies for one model may be an exact replacement for OEM printer supplies designed for a machine from a different manufacturer altogether.
- Some aftermarket manufacturers sell supplies that are called “universal” supplies, because they work with a broader range of printers than OEM products. If you don’t know what works with what, you lose the chance of benefiting from the versatility offered by universals.
TRI Resources takes all of these factors into account in the research for our cross-reference and compatibility database.