HP earlier this week announced breakthroughs in printer ink, printer toner, and media technologies that allow customers to get color printing quality comparable to offset printing.

The list of the HP’s breakouts includes:

• ColorSphere Toner
• Dual Drop Volume Technology
• Enhanced ‘Low Melt’ Monochrome Toner
• ColorLok Media
• XL Inkjet Print Cartridges
• Simple Black range of cartridges
• Dual Pack LaserJet Cartridges

Now let us see what is what and who is who. (more…)

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

Previously we have established that original HP ink cartridges have at least 2 levels of protection: genuine labels and “best before” dates. How about the toner cartridges?

Monochrome laser is the most common printing technology for offices. According to HP, replacement of a toner cartridges renews 2/3 of the whole printing mechanism. So it’s worth making sure the cartridge you buy is not a freud.

For demonstration purposes we used HP Q2612A and C7115T toner cartridges. Here are several signs to tell you the cartridge you hold is a genuine HP toner cartridge:

• specific location of the hologram label
• air-proof package of the cartridge inside the box
• protective tape in cartridge
• production codes on the cartidge casing and on the box

(more…)

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

Previously on ”How to Detect and Fix Problems with Laser Monochrome Printing” we examined toner cartridge components and reviewed several possible reasons of printing problems. Today we shall pick up from where we left last time.

3. Magnetic Roller

This roller in HP printer is a metal cylinder covered with special coating with a magnetized bar inside. This part rarely gets out of order. For most part dirty print is caused by toner dosing.

The dirt “gives” a stripe to magnetic roller, thus, “taking away” a stripe from image on prints:

One of the signs of incorrect toner dosing is spilling of toner into the split between the metering blade and the magnetic roller:

Toner is spilled onto magnetic roller, which transfers the toner on photo drum. Photo drum, in turn, transfers the toner on paper, just like it should. This is how those needless stripes occur along the length of the page. The stripes may be black, if the split is wider than necessary for toner dosing, or they may be light, when the dosing is hindered due to dirt-clogged split.

In the office, anything may qualify as dirt, even a fly.

 Again, the problem is fixed by reassembling the cartridge or by replacing it with new.

4. Waste Toner Hopper

As we mentioned at the beginning, a cartridge contains a wiper blade that cleans unused toner. Such toner is collected into special container, waste hopper, and then is cleaned out during remanufacturing and refilling. Alas, sometimes low quality toner or carelessness of labor may lead to unpredictable results.

The prints clearly show that overrun waste hopper makes the toner spill over.

To fix this problem you should empty the waste hopper or replace the cartridge.

It’s worth mentioning that printing artifacts are not always due to faulty parts. For most users, a printer is a mere box that prints. However, for all technical service engineers printer is a piece of art, even if it’s a simple desktop monochrome printer. So, before blaming it all on printing consumables, one should make sure it is cartridge that’s guilty.

An exotic deviations in hardware of Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 1300: failed changes of thermofilm caused ripples around letters:

To determine which part of the printer is guilty of bad printing, it is necessary to have some knowledge of printing technologies and how they work.

Certainly, looking for most common cartridge breakings we can consider 5-7 more situations of bad printing. But it’s very often that the cartridge was used for 2-3 or even 10 times. Such a prolonged use results in critical worn-out and subsequent replacement of this and that parts of the cartridge. To avoid these unexpected troubles, use only quality printing consumables. The trick is not to get confused with everyday situation when looking for some extraordinary breaking:

This cartridge is simply running out of toner:

Cartridges won’t fail if you regularly replace them and use quality toner for refills. Remember, saving on savings may cost you a pretty penny.

That’s how prints should look like, regardless printer brand or model. They are all crisp and contrast, without a single mark. Making the right decision on printing supplies and refilling and remanufacturing company, will save time and money and spare you of headache. This is a fact proven by time and numerous companies.

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

Continuation of part 1

This time we shall consider toner cartridge defects, their aftermath and ways to fix them. Previously we found that cartridge consists of several part. Despite the small amount of parts, there are enough factors affecting quality of printing.

1. Organic Photo Conductor (OPC)

OPC is also known as photo drum, drum, photoreceptor or photoconductor. On its surface a toner image to be transferred to paper is created. This dictates peculiarities of its functioning.

Problem with photo drum of cartridge for Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 1200 printer.

Most common defect is black patterns appearing on the print’s edges. This means the photoreceptor is critically worn out. Photo sensitive coating is rubbed off, and toner first adheres to “naked” drum and then gets transferred to paper.

This is how the worn-out looks like on the photoreceptor. Factually, this is a physical process of drum coating rubbing against paper and toner.

Unfortunately, the problem can only be solved by replacing the drum. All known efforts to restore photosensitive coating show little or no results, when it comes to equipment testing. However, in a year or so the technology advances and a photoreceptor can be restored even at home.

Faulty parts are not always the reason of bad prints or photocopies. Dirt, dust and toner coarse grinding may also cause black marks on freshly churned pages.

The dirt between the wiper blade and the photo drum clearly exhibits itself:

And it finds its way to the prints:

This issue gets fixed simply by reassembling the cartridge. Most easy and faster way is to complete replace the cartridge.

2. Primary Charge Roller (PCR)

The second component of the printing system is PCR. This is a spongy roller that applies initial charge and removed residual charge from the drum. The roller is actually a metal rod in a rubber coat. Troubles it can “reward” the prints will always be noticable.

You can never tell working PCR from faulty just by looking at them:

But prints made with new and old PCR tell you everything:

Charge rollers cannot be repaired, only replaced with a new.

Joins us next time to learn other cartridge defects and ways to fix them.

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

This article covers common issues that rise during the use of most toner cartridges. For practical purposes the cartridge examined is made by Hewlett-Packard and there are reasons for that. First, this brand has long been a leader on printer market. Second, cartridge refilling which is still widely used by small business and home offices.

What you see above is a perfect test page. Of course, it’s a 99% merit of new original cartridge. Original makers of printer consumables have a smoothly running production and high-level quality management. Up to 2% of total output is tiny figure for rejection rate provided by major brands. However, that doesn’t mean third-party manufacturers make cheap and inferior products. Compatible printer cartridges can also be reliable in use. It’s all a matter of specific brand, it’s quality management and, surely, the warranty.

Considering that cartridges get refilled, it come as no surprise that after 5-7 refills printing artifacts appear. This is caused by time, lifespan, yield and low quality of parts, and sometimes carelessness of laborer or production equipment failure.

Practically speaking, here is a good example for this article:

The look of this page can tell you that the cartridge is empty, charged roller is broken, there’s a split between developer roller and toner hopper and photoreceptor drum requires replacement. Reading these problems from a printout is easily available to everyone, regardless of his job position or level of technical skills. Don’t you agree it’s great to know a bit more than others and to put that knowledge to use?

What a cartridge is made of?

These are the cartridge parts involved in the process of printing

The picture above shows parts of HP Q2612A toner cartridge, but they are common for most HP monochrome cartridges. From top to bottom:

• Wiper blade (cleans excessive toner from the drum)
• Photo imaging drum (creates initial image)
• Charged roller (charges and discharges the drum)

Magnetic roller and metering blade responsible for toner transfer to photo drum are missing from this picture. All together these parts make up imaging unit. Some cartridge makers, unlike HP, separate drum from toner unit.

In the next part we wil turn from theory to practice.

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

Just like any other industry, printers and printer supplies manufacturing produces lots of waste. The problem of supplies, that is toner and ink cartridges, is nowadays solved by remanufacturing or recycling.

Remanufacturing, roughly put, is a process of reconstructing of a cartridge; we’ve discussed it our previous article, you can read it to get the details. Recycling means physical destruction of an object into raw material and creating new items from it. And it is recycling that is the topic of today’s post.

Let’s suppose you like Samsung laser printers so much that you own one. Now let’s assume you are so green that mere idea of empty cartridges going into landfill makes you turn red. All that provided, there is a really good news for you.

Just the other day Samsung launched the STAR program, which stands for Samsung Takeback And Recycle program. This program offers free return and recycling of empty Samsung toner cartridges and two options to do so.

The first way is to look inside a box of new Samsung toner cartridge. Inside you will find a pre-addressed, pre-paid FedEx shipping label. You can use new cartridge’s box as a container for the used cartridges, and put the label on it. Then you just contact FedEx for a free pickup, or drop the box off at any FedEx offices.

The other was is a bit more complicated, but fun if you’re an addicted internet surfer. Go to www.samsung.com/starus where you can print out the same pre-addressed and pre-paid FedEx return shipping label. After that, repeat your action from the way one.

When done, you can rest assured you’re saving the world from waste landfills. By the way, did you ever wondered what is created from recycled cartridges? Cartridges again? Not always.

UK-based company called Waycam has found another use of plastic recycled from every toner cartridge. They claim to “have a solution for total recycling and reuse of every part of a toner cartridge, toner bottle or ink jet including most importantly the toner powder itself.”

So, what is the solution? After all metal components removed, the plastic is recycled into what is called ‘TRI-wood’, Toner Recycled into Wood. This plastic wood is then used to produce these nice fence post or comfortable chair:

Waycam promises 100% recycling and no landfill or incineration. Apart from toner cartridges, the company also recycles TVs, laptops, computers and monitors.

Isn’t it a great way to commemorate the equipment that served you long and well. Or banish what served you short and bad.

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

HP claimed it’s giving up its camera manufacturing business. Instead the company plans to focus more resources on Print 2.0 – the new web-centered printing concept.

However, the company is going to maintain the brand and now is looking for an OEM partner that will design, build and distribute digital cameras under HP label.

HP wants to accelerate its investment in Print 2.0 initiative, which the company unveiled in May at its Imaging and Printing Conference in New York. According to HP, 53 trillion pages will be printed in 2010, creating a market valued at more than $296 billion. Most part of those pages is to be printed from the Web. HP’s Print 2.0 strategy is focused on using Web-based services to get a significant share of the growing number of digital pages printed each year.

This move of HP seems very logical, I mean who ever bought HP digital cameras?

Purchasing future revenues, HP also keeps up with current developments. Researchers from Palo Alto have created toner particles that are chemically grown. Usually toner powder is produced by mechanically grounding carbon block, but HP’s spherical monochrome toner is vat-grown.

Such chemical origination of toner has some advantages over regular toner. HP claims chemical growth of toner results in a consistently round toner particle. Even round particles allows for a more efficient printing process leading to a smaller cartridge. HP also claims that printer toner would be applied on paper more precisely because of the evenness of this new toner particle.

Let’s turn from Goliath to David. A start-up company from Cambridge, Inkski, has developed a very fast printing method. The new technology called “Lilo”, Light Initiated Liquid Offset, can deliver up to 400,000 drops per second from each channel. This is about 20 times faster than a general inkjet print head can produce.

Lilo works like this. Drops of ink are formed in a regular array on a rapidly rotating cylinder, using a photonic trigger to eject drops. The tiny drops can be held on the cylinder by surface tension balanced against the centrifugal force tending to throw them off. A laser beam releases drops from the cylinder.

The Lilo technology uses conventional inks and offers nearly similar per page costs as standard methods of digital printing, except pages can be printer much faster. The technology employs no nozzles, so there should be no clogging and smudging.

Hope to see new printer built using this technology.

Submit to:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!