Printer Tips

Laser Toner & Ink Cartridge Care

Getting the most out of your printer cartridges depends, in part, on how you treat them. Here's how to extend the life of your cartridges and ensure the highest print quality.

Toner

• Use recycled toner cartridges to save money.
• Redistribute toner in the cartridge (follow user manual's instructions) in order to extend the cartridge's life.
• Keep toner cartridges in their packages prior to use.
• Run a print test after installing a new cartridge; you'll get a page count to help track how many prints you get from the cartridge.

• Do not expose cartridges to excessive heat, sunlight or prolonged room light.
• Do not turn toner cartridges upside down.

Ink

• Use recycled ink cartridges, if they're available for your printer.
• Take tape strips off high-capacity black cartridges for full ink access.
• Use cartridges before their expiration dates.
• Run a print test when using a new cartridge or one you haven't used lately.

• Do not remove cartridges from their sealed containers until you're ready to install them.
• Do not expose ink cartridges to air; keep them in your printer or in a storage garage until you're ready to use them.
• Do not allow copper to touch any surface of the cartridge.
• Do not touch cartridges except on black, green or blue areas.

Printer Terms

BUFFER - The storage memory printers use to hold incoming text when data is coming faster than your printer's engine can handle. This allows you to return to your application faster.

CONSUMABLES - The supplies that your printer uses up while accomplishing its job: toner, ink, paper, labels, etc.

DUPLEX PRINTING - A printer's ability to print on both sides of a page with one pass through the machine.

DUTY CYCLE RATING - A measure of durability of a printer engine, usually defined as the number of pages per month that the printer can produce without sustaining damage.

IMAGE SMOOTHING - A printer's ability to produce sharper images by placing small dots at the white corners of jagged lines, which smooth rough edges. HP's version is Resolution Enhancement technology (Ret): Epson's is Resolution Improvement Technology (RITech).

PAGE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE (PDL) - The language and commands that tell your printer how to create an image in print. Most printers use some version of either HP's PCL or Adobe's PostScript.

PRINT SPEED - Measured in pages per minute in two ways. "Rated engine speed"- the number of pages of text only that a printer can produce in one minute using internal fonts. "Throughout" - how fast a printer can produce hard copy from raw data.

PRINTER MEMORY/RAM - Random Access Memory inside your printer that stores data sent from your computer. The more complex your documents, the more printer memory you need.

RESOLUTION - The image quality of a printed page, usually measured by the number of dots per inch printed. Halftone image quality is described by lines per inch. The more dots or lines per inch, the better the image quality.

SPOOLING - "Simultaneous Print Operations On-Line." In a network environment, spooling lets you send more than one document at a time to print with immediate return to your application. The data streams for print jobs are stored as files in a print server's print queue.

WYSIWYG - "What You See Is What You Get." The goal (not yet perfected) of printing technology is matching what you see on your high-resolution screen with what you get from your comparatively low-resolution printer.

Home Page Back to M.I.S.