By Ilse Hagen

A printer toner is a powder used to refill the ink of a laser printer. It consists of positively and negatively charged particles, which serves to control the color and intensity of the marks made on the paper. It produces longer-lasting prints on your paper compared to cartridges and even printer ribbons. The toner comes in both black and colored.

Kinds of printer toners

Before, printer toners are very expensive, resulting in people coming up with alternatives to prolong their ink life. However, today, several companies are selling alternative printer toners for your laser printer.

Original equipment manufacturer (OEM) printer toner cartridge

OEM printer toners are original toners produced by the makers of the printer. They work only for the specific brand or model it comes with. They are also produced by the manufacturer of the printer. OEM toners produce high quality printing jobs but are more expensive than other toners.

Remanufactured printer toner cartridge

Remanufactured printer toners are refilled original cartridges that have almost the same standards as OEM toners. Remanufactured toners are cheaper than OEM toners.

Compatible printer toner cartridge

Compatible printer toners are the cheapest types of toners. They are made from used parts of OEM cartridges and are designed to be compatible with specific printer brands. They are low quality and should definitely be tested to ensure good performance.

Buying tips

Before buying a printer toner, make sure to check for your printer’s compatibility. Also, it is highly recommended that the toner be tested for quality and performance before purchase.
Finally, if you are aiming for high quality prints, use OEM toners.

Shopping help / Consumer information

A complete Guide to PRINTER TONERS is available in Picky Guide, one of the fastest growing online magazines giving free consumer advice and product information.

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By Michelle Bery

With a computer printer sitting on most office desks – both at home and at the office – most users have come to understand the role of the printer toner. But, in most cases, the extent of our knowledge is limited to knowing when and how the printer toner cartridge must be changed. And change it we do, without having any real understanding of how it functions within our printer.

Printer toner contains the ink – whether in liquid or powder form – that allows our computer documents to come to life so that we may hold them in our hand. When we choose the print option from our computer, a signal is sent to the printer, and ink – of all necessary colors – is released onto our papers reproducing exactly the document we constructed on our computer.

Each printer comes equipped with compatible printer toner. Depending on the volume with which we print, the printer toner will have to be changed periodically or more frequently. In this case, we purchase replacement printer toner – which in many a case can be an expensive proposition.

Of course when replacing the printer toner most people turn to the printer manufacturer. The specific printer toner that is compatible with your printer comes with a product number that will help you easily and conveniently locate a replacement. While this can be a more pricey option then purchasing a generic alternative, you are sure to get the quality that your printer needs. Lower quality printer toner, while always less expensive, can seriously clog and damage your printer.

That is not to say, however, that you can not find quality printer toner at reasonable prices. There are generic brands that offer superior quality at a more affordable cost. The key is ensuring that you are dealing with a reputable company that will stand behind the products they sell.

Printer toner is an inevitable part of printer ownership. Take your time to learn what works and what prices you can find so that you affordably address your printer needs.

For easy to understand, in depth information about printer toner visit our ezGuide 2 Printer.

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By Bill Tucker

These two different types of printers achieve the same thing. They both print, but they go about it in a very different manner. There are major differences in the engines that drive them and the work they are required to do.

Laser printers are designed to be used in a heavy work load environment. The cost per print is much less expensive compared to Inkjet models. Laser printers use a dry mono-component toner cartridge and a laser that shoots the image onto a drum inside the toner cartridge.

Inkjet printers are designed for a different work load. They are designed more for a work station such as an individual’s desk or for low volume type work. The toner or ink is quite expensive. Most are slow, so using them in a high volume application would drive a person crazy waiting for a hundred page report. Let me say something about the cost of Inkjet cartridges. I read an article that said that Inkjet cartridges are more expensive per weight than imported Russian Caviar. Inkjets use a liquid ink that is sprayed onto the paper. They all have a scanner rail that goes back and forth, carrying the Ink cartridges distributing the ink.

I read a post that several people commented on. They said that Hewlett Packard has really gone down hill lately with the quality of their printers. They were commenting on the HP LaserJet 4, a very popular laser printer of the past. It is about ten to years old, but it is a very dependable printer. I still use one in my office!

They were comparing it to several new HP Inkjet Printers. These are completely different machines for completely different applications. If you want to compare this machine to another HP product use the HP laser jet 4250. You really can’t compare these either. The memory, speed and options are made for the latest printing applications. Remember that the HP LJ- 4 was built around 386 computers. By the way, my HP LJ-4 works great with XP.

The price of Inkjet printers is driven by consumers that want something cheap. You get what you pay for. It is the market that creates cheap Inkjet printers. They do work well, but if they break they are not designed to repair. They are known as disposable printers. Not all Inkjet printers are disposable printers. The Inkjet is really progressing and will continue to fill more of the market place. Speed has been an issue but now they have designed some that keep up with the speed of laser printers. HP color Inkjets also make terrific color prints. Even a person with a limited budget can make great presentations, photos and flyers.

When you purchase a printer, you should always consider the type of application that it will be used for. Don’t buy an Inkjet when you’re going to be printing hundreds of reports. Don’t buy a laser printer if you print two or three jobs a day. If you look at cost per print and monthly volume you can’t go wrong. Hewlett Packard printers are some of the best you can buy, but you need to use them in the proper application.

Bill Tucker has been in the office equipment and supply industry for over 20 years and has several published industry related articles that help the end-user as well as the technician.

Click here for more industry related articles and high quality OEM and compatible toner cartridges –TonerOvernight.com

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By Henry Neal

Printer utility is what the doctor can order to improve upon your printing experience. Printers today, are a household item which we need for our day-to-day printing jobs. Some of us have professional use of a printer. Printers, in every sphere are assuming added importance due to our need to put written matter into an structured printed format.

However, at the same time, it becomes more mandatory for us, what with increasing volume of dat amnd printing requirements that we put our printing jobs in the right perspective. This is to say, that you need not spend more and more hours in to your printing as your wok load actually increases. And this is possible if you have with you the right printing tools.

There are now many resources available on the net that ca help you out with your printing tasks. One among them is the printer setup utility. This is a shareware available on Tray selector website that gives you document setup profile options to do away the need for countless mouse clicks.
Printing tools as these can be of immense help to give you a smoother printing experience while getiing over your job faster. And especially so, if you consistently require formats and styles of documents of differing types.

So for all you know, all those tedious manual setups can be a thing of the past if you equip yopuself with the print utilities that are designed to be just that. It is, you can say, another small step toward a future characterized by enhanced technology and comfort.

Henry Neal is working in computer hardware sector for a long time. Writing is his passion. He has combined his passion and profession in a fantastic manner. He has been writing informative articles on computer hardware, sharewares, etc to help people understand the intricacies and take proper decisions while purchasing these products.For more information, visit our site http://www.trayselector.com/

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By Simon Rogers

The printers utilizing inkjet technology were first introduced in the late 1980s and since then have gained much popularity while growing in performance and dropping in price. They are the most common type of computer printers for the general consumer due to their low cost, high quality of output, capability of printing in vivid color, and ease of use. Each printer which works on inkjet technology places extremely small droplets of ink onto paper to create a text or an image. In the personal and small business computer market, inkjet printers currently predominate. Inkjets are usually inexpensive, quiet, reasonably fast, and many models can produce high quality output. Like most modern technologies, the present-day inkjet is built on the progress made by many earlier versions. Among many contributors, Epson, Hewlett-Packard and Canon can claim a substantial share of credit for the development of the modern inkjet technology.

In the worldwide consumer market, four manufacturers account for the majority of inkjet printer sales: Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Epson, and Lexmark. The typical inkjet printer usually includes inkjet printhead assembly, paper feed assembly, power supply, control circuitry and interface ports. The inkjet printhead assembly contains several components. One of them is the printhead which is the core of the inkjet printer and contains a series of nozzles that are used to spray drops of ink. Another printhead component is the inkjet cartridge or inkjet tank. Depending on the manufacturer and model of the printer, ink cartridges come in various combinations, such as separate black and color cartridges, color and black in a single cartridge or even a cartridge for each ink color. The cartridges of some inkjet printers include the print head itself. The printhead along with the inkjet cartridge/s are moved back and forth across the paper by device called a stepper motor using a special belt.

Some printers have an additional stepper motor to park the print head assembly when the printer is not in use which means that the print head assembly is restricted from accidentally moving. The print head assembly uses a stabilizer bar to ensure that movement is precise and controlled. One of the paper feed assembly components is the paper tray or/and paper feeder. Most inkjet printers have a tray that the paper is loaded into. The feeder typically snaps open at an angle on the back of the printer, allowing the paper to be placed in it. Feeders generally do not hold as much paper as a traditional paper tray. A set of rollers pull the paper in from the tray or feeder and advance the paper when the print head assembly is ready for another pass after which another step motor powers the rollers to move the paper in the exact increment needed to ensure a continuous image is printed.

While earlier printers often had an external transformer, most printers sold today use a standard power supply that is incorporated into the printer itself. A small but sophisticated amount of circuitry is built into the printer to control all the mechanical aspects of operation, as well as decode the information sent to the printer from the computer. It is connected to the computer by a cable through the interface port. The interface port can be either parallel port, USB port or SCSI port. The parallel port is still used by many printers, but most newer printers use the USB port. A few printers connect using a serial port or small computer system interface (SCSI) port. Different types of inkjet printers exist based on the method they use to deliver the droplets of ink. There are three main inkjet technologies currently used by printer manufacturers. The thermal bubble technology used by manufacturers such as Canon and Hewlett Packard is commonly referred to as bubble jet. In a thermal inkjet printer, tiny resistors create heat, and this heat vaporizes ink to create a bubble.

As the bubble expands, some of the ink is pushed out of a nozzle onto the paper. When the bubble collapses, a vacuum is created. This pulls more ink into the print head from the cartridge. A typical bubble jet print head has 300 or 600 tiny nozzles, and all of them can fire a droplet simultaneously. Thermal inkjet technology is used almost exclusively in the consumer inkjet printer market. The ink used is usually water-based, pigment-based or dye-based but the print head is produced usually at less cost than other ink jet technologies. Contrary to the bubble jet technology, the piezoelectric technology, patented by Epson, uses piezo crystals. A crystal is located at the back of the ink reservoir of each nozzle. The crystal receives a tiny electric charge that causes it to vibrate. When the crystal vibrates inward, it forces a tiny amount of ink out of the nozzle. When it vibrates out, it pulls some more ink into the reservoir to replace the ink sprayed out.

The continuous inkjet method is used commercially for marking and coding of products and packages. The first patent on the idea is from 1867, by William Thomson. The first commercial model was introduced in 1951 by Siemens. In continuous inkjet technology, a high-pressure pump directs liquid ink from a reservoir through a microscopic nozzle, creating a continuous stream of ink droplets. A piezoelectric crystal causes the stream of liquid to break into droplets at regular intervals. The ink droplets are subjected to an electrostatic field created by a charging electrode as they form. The field is varied according to the degree of drop deflection desired. This results in a controlled, variable electrostatic charge on each droplet. Charged droplets are separated by one or more uncharged “guard droplets” to minimize electrostatic repulsion between neighboring droplets. The charged droplets are then directed (deflected) to the receptor material to be printed by electrostatic deflection plates, or are allowed to continue on undeflected to a collection gutter for reuse.

Continuous inkjet is one of the oldest inkjet technologies in use and is fairly mature. One of its advantages is the very high velocity (~50 m/s) of the ink droplets, which allows the ink drops to be thrown a long distance to the target. Another advantage is freedom from nozzle clogging as the jet is always in use When printing is started, the software application sends the data to be printed to the printer driver which translates the data into a format that the printer can understand and checks to see that the printer is online and available to print. The data is sent by the driver from the computer to the printer via the connection interface. The printer receives the data from the computer. It stores a certain amount of data in a buffer. The buffer can range from 512 KB random access memory (RAM) to 16 MB RAM, depending on the printer model. Buffers are useful because they allow the computer to finish with the printing process quickly, instead of having to wait for the actual page to print. If the inkjet printer has been idle for a period of time, it will normally go through a short cleaning cycle to make sure that the print heads are clean. Once the cleaning cycle is complete, the inkjet printer is ready to begin printing. The control circuitry activates the paper feed stepper motor.

This engages the rollers, which feed a sheet of paper from the paper tray / feeder into the printer. A small trigger mechanism in the tray / feeder is depressed when there is paper in the tray or feeder. If the trigger is not depressed, the inkjet printer lights up the “Out of Paper” LED and sends an alert to the computer. Once the paper is fed into the inkjet printer and positioned at the start of the page, the print head stepper motor uses the belt to move the print head assembly across the page. The motor pauses for the merest fraction of a second each time that the print head sprays dots of ink on the page and then moves a tiny bit before stopping again. This stepping happens so fast that it seems like a continuous motion. Multiple dots are made at each stop. It sprays the CMYK (cyan / magenta / yellow / black) colors in precise amounts to make any other color imaginable. At the end of each complete pass, the paper feed stepper motor advances the paper a fraction of an inch. Depending on the inkjet printer model, the print head is reset to the beginning side of the page, or, in most cases, simply reverses direction and begins to move back across the page as it prints. This process continues until the page is printed. The time it takes to print a page can vary widely from printer to printer. It will also vary based on the complexity of the page and size of any images on the page. Once the printing is complete, the print heads are parked. The paper feed stepper motor spins the rollers to finish pushing the completed page into the output tray.

Most inkjet printers today use inkjet inks that are very fast-drying, so that you can immediately pick up the sheet without smudging it. Compared to earlier consumer-oriented printers, inkjet printers have a number of advantages. They are quieter in operation than impact dot matrix printers or daisywheel printers. They can print finer, smoother details through higher printhead resolution, and many inkjet printers with photorealistic-quality color printing are widely available. In comparison to more expensive technologies like thermal wax, dye sublimations, and laser printers, the inkjet printers have the advantage of practically no warm-up time and lower cost per page (except when compared to laser printers).

The disadvantages of the inkjet printers include flimsy print heads (prone to clogging) and expensive inkjet cartridges. This typically leads value-minded consumers to consider laser printers for medium-to-high volume printer applications. Other disadvantages include ink bleeding, where ink is carried sideways away from the desired location by the capillary effect; the result is a muddy appearance on some types of paper. Most inkjet printer manufacturers also sell special clay-treated paper designed to reduce bleeding. Because the ink used in most inkjet cartridges and ink tanks is water-soluble, care must be taken with inkjet-printed documents to avoid even the smallest drop of water, which can cause severe “blurring” or “running.”

Besides the well known small inkjet printers for home and office, there is a market for professional inkjet printers; some being for page-width format printing, and most being for wide format printing. “Page-width format” means that the print width ranges from about 8.5″ to 37″. “Wide format” means that these are inkjet printers ranging in print width from 24″ up to 15′. The application of the page-width inkjet printers is for printing high-volume business communications that have a lesser need for flashy layout and color. Particularly with the addition of variable data technologies, the page-width inkjet printers are important in billing, tagging, and individualized catalogs and newspapers. The application of most of the wide format inkjet printers is for printing advertising graphics; a minor application is printing of designs by architects or engineers.

Simon Rogers is a marketing associate for PriceLess-InkJet Cartridges Co., a major reseller of inkjet cartridges, laser toner cartridge and other printing supplies. For more information on printer cartridges, printing technologies, alternative printer supplies and other related issues please visit PriceLess-InkJet Cartridges Co
or email us at Mail Room

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