Best Multifunction Printers for the Home Office

There are a lot of printers in the market that do a lot of different things. Unfortunately, most of these printers are doomed to be travelling wanderers for their lives; jacks of all trades but masters of none. Aww! Multifunction printers that do more than one thing well are difficult to come by, and often come with other drawbacks such as excessive laser cartridge or printer ink usage. So today we check out some top models of multifunction printer on the market that are more than one-trick ponies, and won't cost the earth.

 Epson Stylus Photo TX710W

 The Epson Stylus TX710W is a fabulous photo printer, and produces excellent quality CD and DVD prints also, along with fairly standard quality text. The printer cartridges run to the expensive side for this multifunction printer, so if you don't print often but want good quality when you do, this is the model for you.

Canon Pixma MP560

Another great little photo printer, this is an excellent multifunction mid-range offering. It prints, copies and scans (although doesn't include fax capability), and has a very easy to setup wireless connection. The ink cartridges come in a set of five, so you don't have to worry about constant waste from a tri-color cartridge if you do a lot of photo printing.

HP Photosmart Premium All-in-One C309g

HP make some fabulous printers ... even if there aren’t too many other electronics that they do a good job of! It has an automatic duplexer, has fabulous black and white text quality, and connects via either wireless, Ethernet or Bluetooth. It's a printer, copier and scanner, and while people have mixed reviews of its reliability, they do note that it uses printer ink quickly. If you want a good multifunction offering for infrequent printing, this is a good choice.

HP Officejet Pro 8500 Wireless
Another good HP offering ... as long as you are using it with a very standard setup. The software and firmware can be a bit troublesome, but for those using the most 'ordinary' of operating systems and programs with this printer, it is a wonderful complete home office solution ... even including a fax machine.

Lexmark Interact S605

This is not priced as an entry-level multifunction printer, and it doesn’t work very fast. That said, everything it does is fabulous quality. There is no compromise between text and photo quality. No fax machine, but it prints, copies and scans as well as handling a wide range of paper sizes.

5 Ways to Green Your Printing Habits

We live in a world of very resource-intensive living. Electricity is used for the most basic of tasks, there are more and more trees cut down every year, and waste seems a natural part of life. Along with all that waste can come a fair bit of guilt, even if there are no immediate consequences, and the wasted paper, printer toner and printer ink that comes along with certain printing behaviors is actually a major source of guilt for many Canadians. Today we look at 5 ways you can green your printing habits, cut the guilt and preserve the planet for future generations. 

Buy a duplex printer, and ...

Printers with the capability for duplex are actually fairly common ... but it seems that people simply don’t use the function. The technology is not well established, and there are often problems with this feature. You need to not only buy a printer that supports duplex printing, but one that will do it quickly and conveniently enough that you actually use the feature.

Start a re-usable paper stack
Reducing your usage and re-using what you can are preferable to recycling sheets of paper that are accidentally printed. So, start a stack of paper that has a single web address on one side, nothing but a document header just one sentence and re-use it either for notes and scrap, or printing non-critical documents.

Recycle your printer cartridges

There are quite a few depot points across the country that take used printer ink cartridges. The plastic from these can’t be recycled along with ordinary plastics, so start a collection and take them down to the recycling station once you have a few.

Use Draft Mode
Don’t print everything on high quality - this will save on printer ink, which is both environmentally friendly and wallet friendly!

Take stock

Pay attention to the type of stock you use in your printer. Cotton, hemp and bamboo papers are all more sustainable that standard printer paper. You may have to experiment with print settings a little, but you'll feel much better about yourself! Order ahead online and you won’t be tempted to run out and grab the first tree-killing ream you see in the grocery store.

Toner Industry Overview

Direct Electrostatic Printing
Photocopying, laser printing and industrial digital printing all have their roots in electrophotographic technology invented almost 30 years ago. Since that time, companies such as AGFA-Gevaert, Xerox, Lexmark, Sharp, Hewlett Packard, and others have incorporated various forms of electrophotographic technology into their printers.

Direct electrostatic printing is based on a principle that is deceptively simple. A toner source delivers charged toner particles through a print head structure (consisting of a polymeric substrate with apertures and at least one set of control electrodes) to the image receiver (a sheet of paper, for example) in front of a back electrode. The propulsion field present between the toner source and the back electrode, means that negatively charged toner particles are attracted to the receiver on the back electrode, thus creating an image on the paper.

Toner Manufacturing Process
The traditional "pulverization technique" of toner particle production involves the blending of resin, charge agent control, wax, carbon black, and iron oxide. This is then heated and melted under high pressure, extruded through a dye and granulated.

The resulting flakes are ground by air jet milling. Air jet mills can produce micron-sized particles without generating heat, which would otherwise denature the toner product. Spinning classifier wheels at the top prevent particles leaving the mill before they have been ground to a size below the classifier cut size. Unground particles are returned to the bed via an internal mill recycle. The cut size is controlled by varying the speed of the classifier (the faster the spin, the lower the cut size). Superfines (whose presence often represents wastage in the milling process) are removed and additives may be blended with the toner before final bagging.

Toner particle size can be controlled to within ±0.3 - 0.5 µm, whereas the average particle size is 8 µm. Particle size distribution can also be controlled. Depending on specific requirements, the standard deviation of particle size distribution can be around 1.0 µm.

On-line particle size measurement is now used by many toner manufacturers to continuously monitor the particle size distribution and, by using multiple analyzers at different steps of the process, measure the unit operation yield in real-time.

Why is toner particle size distribution important?
A great deal of R&D effort has gone into improving print head design and toner transfer. The goal has been to produce simpler and increasingly more accurate systems with fewer components and improved imaging, which are suitable for a wide range of consumer and industrial digital printing applications. Final image quality though can be compromised by the quality of the toner itself.

Toner companies have therefore been faced with the task of improving the toner particles. While individual manufacturers have their own formulae for toners, most comprise around 90% thermo-plastics that are colored with 10% carbon black pigment and set with infrared following transfer to paper. Traditionally, dry toner particles are made by compounding, pelletizing and granulation, followed by micronization, classification and sieving. This results in a fine powder with a tight specification for particle size distribution. However, the method has several drawbacks, notably variation in particle shape and charge-to-mass ratio as well as the creation of dust particles. These can cause problems as the particles are propelled through tiny apertures in the print head. Larger or irregularly shaped particles can cause blockage while dust particles adhere to the print head surface and are too small to have enough charge to be controllable.

The ability to control the effects of electrostatic and electrodynamic forces lies with the way in which the toner is prepared. Preparation affects particle shape, particle size, particle size distribution, charge and surface treatment. The trend is to the smaller, narrower particle size and particle size distribution requirements needed for the production of higher resolution images.

Traditionally the electrozone counter method has been the standard for particle size analysis in toner manufacture, something that is now being replaced with on-line, real-time particle sizing that allows direct and immediate control of the production process.

Why is toner particle shape so important?
Recent years have seen the development of wet chemical toner processes such as suspension polymerization and emulsion polymerization, which do not involve a milling or classification stage and which have the merit of allowing much greater control of the size distribution, shape and material properties of the toner particles produced. Compared to pulverized toner the shape is far more regular. Many companies are now producing both monochrome and color toners using a wet polymerization process. The toners produced using this process produce material with a narrower particle size and particle shape distribution; this offers improved powder flowability, improved transfer ratio from the photoconductor to the paper and improved image quality.

A number of companies have patented chemical processes for growing toner particles of well-defined shapes. With the ability to produce toners with more precise shape and size distributions comes the need to characterize such materials. Most particle size analysis instruments are not able to measure shape but one exception is the Sysmex FPIA-3000. This instrument has wide use in the toner industry and many patents have been produced based on the optimization of particle shape. Methods have been developed using circularity as the key parameter. A circularity of 0.95-0.96 is optimum, lower than this the toner particles act as an abrasive, higher than this and they act as a lubricant.

Toner manufacturers invest heavily in novel production techniques in order to develop processes that will maximize the proportion of particles with high circularity.

8 Magical Steps for choosing a Printer.

Usually Laser Printers provide better quality than InkJet Printers, but are more expensive. Keep in mind print quality, speed, reliability and price when deciding which printer to buy.

Step 1

You should decide what types of documents you will be printing (text, graphics, odd paper sizes, etc.).

Step 2

You should make a list of specific features you need, like the ability to handle large files, or the ability to print on various media (labels, envelopes) with-out jamming, a size to fit a specific desk spaces, more than one paper trays, and compatibility with popular software.

Step 3

You can even compare the print quality of different printers. Like resolution, DPI (dots per inch). You can use a magnifying glass to compare print quality if it is critical.

Step 4

You can compare speed specifications. The ratings are very useful for comparing printers.

Step 5

Comparing how much RAM the printers have, and if it is expandable or not.

Step 6

In order to handle "Envelops" the printer's paper path needs to be no sharper than 90 degrees to consistently pass  the envelopes, labels, transparencies or card stock. If you plan to use special media often, avoid printers with 180 degree U-turn paper paths.

Step 7

Defiantly compare prices of consumables such as Toner Cartridges, Ink Cartridges, and Replacement Drums.

Step 8

You should compare "Warranties" and "Service Contracts".

How to reset Brother MFC-9440CN Drum Error Message

There are different types of Brother Printers and Multi-Functions in the market now.

One of the best and reliable Printers which is made by brother Company is MFC Series.

MFC-9440CN Is a powerful colour laser Multi-Function for printing, coping, scanning and faxing with all network-ready.

How to Reset the drum error message for Brother MFC-9440:

When you replace the Drum cartridge with a new one, you need to reset the drum cartridge counter by using the following steps:

1. Turn the the machine’s power switch back on.
2. Press Menu > Machine Info. > Reset Menu.
3. Press the Up or Down Arrow key to choose Drum.
4. Press OK.
5. Press 1 to reset the drum unit counter.
6. Press Stop/Exit.

For this model there are two different types of toner capacity.

TN110 Low Capacity (Low Yield)

TN115 High Capacity (High Yield)

What is a compatible cartridge?

A compatible cartridge is a cartridge that is not produced by the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). These cartridges are designed to meet or in best case even exceed the standards set by the OEM in terms of performance, print quality and page yield. To achieve this, the making and quality level of the inkjet ink or laser toner is crucial.

Up until a couple of years ago, finding compatible cartridges for Epson, HP and Lexmark printers was hard. The reason was that printheads was costly and not all that easy to integrate into the cartridge making few compatible Epson cartridges to come out on the market. HP and Lexmark on the other hand had their cartridge design patented which effectively hindered cartridge copies to come out.

Nowadays, compatible cartridges are easy to find for all the larger printer brands such as Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, Lexmark, Samsung and Xerox.

How much can I save buying compatible cartridges?
Huge savings can be done on printer cartridge costs by buying compatible cartridges instead of OEM cartridges. Compatible cartridges are also in general a bit cheaper than remanufactured cartridges.

By segmenting cartridges into OEM/Compatible cartridges and printer brands we get the following results:

A- Compatible inks are between 30%-70% cheaper compared to OEM ink
B- Compatible toners are between 30%-60% cheaper compared to OEM toner

Individual results per printer brand follows below:

Ink Cartridges - Cost Savings Compatible over OEM
Brother 74 %
Canon 70 %
HP 62 %
Epson 65 %
Lexmark 30 %

Toner Cartridges - Cost Savings Compatible over OEM
Canon 60 %
Lexmark 57 %
Xerox 45 %
HP 49 %
Konica Minolta 39 %


Are you allowed to use a compatible cartridge in your printer?
You are allowed to use them in your printer and you will not void your warranty by using them.

This is clearly stated in the Magnusson-Moss Warranty act issued by the Federal Trade Commission. The printer maker cannot force you into only buying their cartridges, it’s up to you as a consumer to make the choice on what you want to buy.

What about the quality of compatible cartridges?
Third party ink producers don't have the financial resources to invest as heavily in R&D as the big printer manufacturers. Still, compatible cartridges holds good standard nowadays as independent research shows. A test by TrustedReviews showed that many users actually prefers the printing results from compatible cartridges while PC World showed that compatible cartridges most often yields more printouts than OEM cartridges.

If you are worried over the quality of the compatible ink or toner please remember that it is not the only factor affecting the print quality. The capabilities of the printer and the quality of the printing paper also have significant impact on the end results.

Compare the Samsung ML-2010 to other Laser printers

The good: It is a fairly fast, inexpensive with a good quality text and very easy to set up to use by PC, Mac and Linux.

The bad: It has a small paper capacity and mediocre graphics quality. This printer doesn't include USB cable.

The bottom line: The Samsung ML-2010 markedly improves on its predecessor but remains a personal laser printer rather than a serious business printer.

Review:

The Samsung ML2010 Printer ia a small, affordable and reliable monochrome laser printer suitable for a home office.

It is a modest for business use, or a well-equipped printer for dorm room. Like any low cost laser printer, the ML2010 has its limitations, such as a small 150 sheet capacity main paper tray and only 8MB of memory, neither of which you can expand.

That should be no problem if you do only occasional black and white document printing at your home or small shop.

In Fact, the ML-2010's clean, compact design and decent output make it desirable for anyone with limited office space, especially students.

You can buy compact toner cartridge for this printer from www.TonerParts.com for almost under $30.