Tobold's Blog
Monday, March 19, 2012
 
How to mess up your laser printer

I made a stupid and rather costly mistake with my color laser printer. I was using special cardstock paper, that is 4 postcard-sized cards on one page with a plastic back. Works wonderfully for printing my monster index cards, and I was also using it to print monster tokens and initiative riders. But once I didn't need all 4 cards, and printed on only 2 of them. So I thought I could just put the half-used page back into my printer after having removed the 2 cards I already printed on. Bad idea! Very bad idea!

The cardstock half printed all right, but once the slightly sticky plastic backing of the removed cards touched the toner drum, it got stuck there. I managed to pull it out, but apparently there was some sort of glue on the backing which had transferred to the toner drums. From then on every time I printed a page, I got magenta, cyan, and blue spots on it. Printing several pages didn't diminish the intensity of the spots, and the printer self-cleaning procedure didn't help either.

The only thing that saved me from having to buy a new printer was that the toner drums in a color laser printer are actually part of the toner cartridge, not the printer itself. So I "only" had to switch out the three color toner cartridges to fix the problem. Fortunately two of them were near empty. But the yellow one was still 75% full, so I ended up losing a hundred bucks worth of toner from this error. :( And all that for trying to save 50 cents worth of cardstock paper. :(

By the way, I wasn't able to find the same 200 g/m2 thick paper in A4 format without the division into 4 cards and without the plastic backing. I see it on Amazon, but the suppliers don't sell to Belgium, probably because sending a pack of paper would cost more postage than the paper is worth. I find a lot of glossy or matte photo paper, but not the normal kind like the HP Color Laser A4 Paper 200 gsm.
Comments:
i think toner drums are part of a cartridge in any laser printer, at least the new ones
 
Same thing happened to me, but it was just a black laser printer. Forunatly toner and drum are seperate, so i didn't lose any toner. But the drum alone was still expensive. Now i know, don't put any plastic in a laser printer.
 
I work for a company that sells paper toner and the like. I asked and it costs us (in the UK) £24 per 1000 and would cost you about 10 euro shipping (though we don't ship to belgium.

I'm told that although it's branded as HP it's actually made by Robert Horne paper company and an equivalent product you could use is manufacturer code hcl0349.

This may or may not help. :)
 
To get supplies, you can look into nearby copy/print shops. They have professional sources for their consumeables and will most likely be happy to sell you some at a reasonable price. Anything that adds volume to their order should be welcome.
 
Maybe you could refill your next yellow cartridge with the toner you have left.

Of course then you could end up breaking your printer once again...
 
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i cloned apps instance from prod to test after that i run a report in test instance i got an error because in print options i selected no print option and it showing no of copies will be 1 other than 0, how do i change this no copies to be zero.Plastic cards Printing
 
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