Whistle Ink ‘Office Supplies’ Blog

Make sure your laser printer is smoking near a window, in a well ventilated room!

 The BBC writes:

The humble office printer can damage lungs in much the same way as smoke particles from cigarettes, according to a team of Australian scientists.

The investigation showed that about 20 laser printers emitted potentially dangerous levels of toner into the air

Almost one-third were found to emit ultra-tiny particles of toner-like material, so small that they can infiltrate the lungs and cause a range of health problems from respiratory irritation to more chronic illnesses.

If you are printing alot of pages, or more importantly large pictures or images, make sure the room is well ventilated, ideally near an open window.

You can get  irritated eyes, headaches and itching skin from photocopier toner and make sure if toner dust is transferred onto your self, maybe via changing the toner cartridge, shaking it sideways etc, you do not let it touch any part of your face.

 Wash the toner from your hands.

BBC Report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6923915.stm

I have the HP PSC 1350, you know those all in one scanner, copier models as well as printing and I was looking at the prices for empty cartridges.

 Can you beleive it that these empty cartridges are very very valuable? One supplier actualy pays £5, but on credit towards purchases of remanufactured / compatible inket cartridges.

Elsewhere on ebay, you can find all sorts of people, normal home users or people in the business of specifically collecting empties and reselling them on. It’s not uncommon to find someone selling 20 empty HP 57 (C6657) and the price go crazy!

It’s room-mate in the printer is usually the C6656AE Black Ink cartridge, for which empties can be sold for around £3.00.

 Why are they worth so much? Because the refilling market is growing. People do not want to pay too much for their cartridges, and business seeing this as an opportunity are collecting empties and then reselling them on after refilling. If they buy for around £5 and sell for £8 - 10, then the customer has got a refilled HP 57 colour cartridge for much less than the original price pf around £16 - and the business person has made some money!

 However, some HP Ink cartridges, as valuable as the HP No 57, will stay with the customer for a long time as they can refill it themselves. It maybe slightly messy but it would save the customer even more money!