Wednesday 27 June 2012

5 Ideas That Will Make You Think About Printers

By Thomas Buchan


Where the environment is concerned, the best thing to do with your empty toner cartridges for your laser printer is to reuse or recycle them, not throw them away. There are multiple benefits to reusing your old toner cartridges; you can save money, and the planet. The real draw for most people who opt to use refilled ink toner cartridges in their laser printer is the dramatic cost savings of using used over new.

The "safe" option that many risk-averse or uncreative thinkers take when they need more toner is to buy brand new OEM cartridges; good option, except they cost a painful amount of money (money which you could use more productively in other ways). Some other people might buy new cartridges from off-brand manufacturers; but the quality of these can be spotty. Refilling your empty ink toner cartridges is a good option for people wanting to save money and enjoy other benefits.

People who love to tinker will love to find out that you can actually refill your own cartridges. Your local office or printer supply store will likely have everything you need to refill your toner cartridges; if not, there are a multitude of resources online to find what you're looking for. Make sure you get the right kind of toner though, and a toner of good quality; otherwise, the quality of your prints could be so bad as to make your prints unusable.

If you're doing the refill yourself, you're going to likely have to (carefully) pour the toner in to a hole in the cartridge. Certain cartridges come already with a hole by which you can refill the cartridge. Other cartridges, if you want to refill them, must have a hole drilled or melted into them; keep this in mind when assessing your comfort level with the complexity of the refill operation. Then the hole is resealed by whatever means available as long as it will be secure; some kits give you a piece of aluminum tape with which to cover the hole.

If you'd rather not fool around with all of this, most ink and toner stores also offer in-house refilling services. This will also save you time not only in doing the refill but in doing the research as to what kind of toner you need and all of that; all you'll have to do is drop off your cartridge and then bring it right back to your office. This method can also be well worth it because a professional is much less likely to make a mistake and ruin your cartridge. Whether you opt to refill yourself or to outsource the refilling of your cartridges, you'll no doubt rest easy knowing that you saved money and helped keep yet another laser toner cartridge out of landfill.




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