Tips and Techniques

• For customers outside of our local delivery area, you can get free shipping on remanufactured cartridges also. Just place an order for $45 or more. With your $45 order, you get free shipping on all remanufactured cartridges.

• You can extend the life of your cartridge by lowering the print intensity on your machine. Lighter print means you can print more pages before running out of toner. Run a print test at several intensities to choose the best balance of yield and print quality.
• Turn on any Econo-Mode features your printer may have. This puts about half as much toner onto each page. Therefore this can greatly increase the life of your cartridge.
• Proof read and spell check your documents before your print them to save both time and money. If you need to print draft copies use any Econo-Mode features your printer may have.
• When you first get a "toner low" message from your machine there is usually some toner left in the cartridge. So don't replace it right away. Instead, remove the toner cartridge from the machine and gently rock the cartridge several times front to back to a 45-degree angle. This will allow you to keep printing for a while longer. The number of extra pages will vary. Don't bother using this tip more than once because doing it again will not give you extra prints.
• Does your machine print out a self-test every time you turn it on? If so, check your manual for instructions for how to turn this feature off.

• If you work in an office you most likely leave your printer on all day. And like most offices, your printer may only be active about two hours a day. If this is true for you make sure that any Power-Save features are turned on. This will power down your machine, after a set period of time, and save on your electric bills. Refer to your User Manual for details on your particular machine.
• Once a year you should have a service technician perform a cleaning on your machine. This can give you better print quality and will lengthen the life of your machine. In fact, it could be better for you also.
  
  Your machine may be giving off dangerous levels of ozone gas. It's true. Machines with ozone filters help process the gas but it needs to be changed on a regular basis, roughly after one year or 30,000 prints. We replace these ozone filters during machine cleanings.
  
  When you schedule a cleaning, ask us about our Total Laser Care (TLC) programs. Our TLC Bronze program can save you money over just a regular cleaning bill.
  
• Each time you replace the toner it's a good time to clean any loose toner from the inside of your machine. First turn off your printer. Then use a clean dry wipe or a vacuum. If your machine utilizes a corona wire use the included tool or a cotton swab to clean the wire.
  
  If you would like help with this procedure please visit our Contact page and e-mail the Service Department.
  
  

• You will find that creating a user account will save you time and enhance your experience while using our website. Although it is not required to order products, doing so will tailor the site to you by auto-entering your information and allowing you to easily reorder products.

• Supplies are sensitive to temperature. And all drum units, OPC kits, and all-in-one cartridges are sensitive to light. If exposed to sun light, even fluorescent lighting, the photosensitive material can be permanently damaged.
  
  To protect your supplies put the following to practice. Avoid extreme temperatures, do not leave supplies in your car during the summer or winter months. Keep supplies stored at room temperatures. Keep supplies out of sunlight and fluorescent lighting. Always store your supplies in anti-static foil bags. Even tape the end of the bag closed.
  

• Murphy's Law states that anything that can go wrong will. And when it comes to printers, this law starts to kick in just when you have a report to get out. And to make things even more "fun", this will happen late Friday afternoon just after the toner place has closed. What do you do now?
  
  Although you can't do anything to prevent from running out of toner there are a few steps you can do ahead of time to prevent emergency situations. The first thing to do is have at least one spare toner cartridge to get you through until you can get a replacement. But even more important is call us as soon as the toner light comes on.
  
  Doing these two things will help you get through these situations and bring a sigh of relief after your initial scare.

• Customers often worry about yield. And all too often they mistakenly try to track yield by time. The amount of time it takes for a cartridge to go empty is not a good indicator of yield.
  
  The cited yield for cartridges are given at 5% coverage. This is not a lot of print on a page. This is typical of a memo. If you are printing letters, using legal size paper, or doing any kind of graphics your yield will vary greatly.
  
  There are two ways to properly check for yield. First is to utilize any page count your machine has. Refer to the User's Manual for instructions. The other way is to count reams or boxes of paper as you use them. Both of these methods will tell you how many pages per cartridge you are getting.
  
  Both methods give you a raw number, you also must take into account your typical print coverage. If all you do is memo's then you should reach the manufacturer's yield specification. But if you write full page letters or print graphs or any kind of graphics your yield will be considerably less. For reference, when we print text and full-page graphics for yield testing, a typical 4,000 page cartridge would run out of toner in about 600 pages.
  

• There are a couple of guidelines for using labels with your laser printer or copier. First, do not run label sheets with any of the labels starting to peel off the sheet. Doing so may cause it to come off inside the printer and you may need a service call to fix it.
  
  For the best results run each sheet through your machine only once. This means you will need to print a full sheet each time. If you run a label sheet back through the machine with some labels missing, it causes residue to enter your cartridge and the print quality can suffer.