General > General Technical Chat
Color Laser Printer WIFI (Although I'm old!)
GlennSprigg:
--- Quote from: tooki on April 02, 2020, 11:32:56 am ---
--- Quote from: jfiresto on April 01, 2020, 10:38:07 am ---
--- Quote from: tooki on April 01, 2020, 10:23:42 am ---... I pulled out the small B&W laser (also a classifieds freebie) that I have for PCB making, only to discover that in the probably 2-3 years it was sitting in the cupboard, the imaging drum has gone bad — it has a horizontal stripe across the drum, presumably from the prolonged contact with another roller....
--- End quote ---
Are you sure it was not (not so) prolonged light pollution?
--- End quote ---
Definitely sure it wasn’t. The printer was in a closed cardboard box, and the cartridge was inside the printer. No way for light to get in. Before going into the box, it worked flawlessly.
The damage to the drum is mechanical: it’s a roughened (textured) line about 1.5mm thick. So it’s not just desensitization of the photosensitive coating.
(It’s a moot point anyway at this point: the printer subsequently decided to commit suicide by wrapping an A5 sheet of toner transfer paper around the fuser drum, and the rotations ironed it down nice and tight. No idea why it choked on the A5, since that is a supported paper size, and it had no trouble with the A4 sheets of transfer paper. In the process of removing that mess, I caused a few scratches to the fuser drum’s Teflon coating. On paper, that just causes very minor flaws, but on toner transfer paper, where toner adhesion is deliberately weak, it tears off chunks of toner. :/ Luckily this thing was a freebie I didn’t pay one cent for!)
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Re: your last paragraph. While recently looking at glossy paper options, especially when people so often now want to print PCB circuits, I was warned to never use paper meant for an InkJet printer, (has a special coating for ink absorption), as the Laser printers have way too much heat and can melt that coating! Don't know if this applies to you or not?
tooki:
--- Quote from: SeanB on April 02, 2020, 12:40:42 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on April 01, 2020, 10:35:39 am ---Addendum to my prior reply to you:
The reason the wax-inkjet Phaser printers were so fast was that they had page-width printheads (one for each color, of course), so it took merely one pass of the transfer belt under the heads to create the image, and then one swift transfer to the paper while ejecting. Pairing that with the fast CPUs they put inside those things is what let them have the superb print speeds.
Anyway. while wax inkjet is now gone, page-width aqueous inkjet now exists. HP sells it as their “PageWide” printers. I’ve not had a chance to try one yet, but if their specs are to be believed, they’ve got outstanding print speeds, with the same low time-to-first-page times as a prewarmed wax Phaser. And the ink for them is cheap. (As in, the cartridges cost a bit, but they’re enormous. AFAIK these have some of the lowest page costs of any desktop/office printers in existence.) Like the wax Phasers, they’re sold as small-workgroup office printers. What I have no idea about is their resilience to sporadic use. I know HP uses a lot of technologies to prevent and clear clogs (like back suction to reverse clogs back out, instead of trying to force them out forward like previous ones), but I just have no practical experience with these.
As for print quality, they wouldn’t be my first choice for photos, as even their maximum resolution (1200x1200dpi) isn’t that high. But I have seen the output from them, and it’s great for business graphics, text, and other everyday documents.
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Phasor printers do have a page width print head, but it makes up an image on the heated transfer drum from multiple rotations of the drum, stepping the head over a pixel width at a time to build up the full page image, then it transfers the hot wax film image from the oil layer onto the paper in a single rotation. There are around 50 IIRC of each colour wax jets, each with it's own channel for hot wax in the main casting, and each with it's own piezo actuator to pump out a droplet of hot wax onto the drum surface as it passes by, just clearing the head. go through the menu structure and get to the test print, and it will make a set of 4 colour bars down the page, each corresponding to a print head output.
Not cheap to run though, as they use around a half stick of the wax ( black still free right) per colur during start up, as the heads are heated up, the vacuum head is pulled over the nozzle area, and the pump runs to pull hot wax through the head multiple times, to clear any air bubbles out of the wax passages. Then the wax is deposited into the maintenance tray as a black blob. then the maintenance tray is lifted up so the wiper pad can clean the drum surface, then it applies the oil film needed to float the image before transferring to the paper as it passes through.
They suck with transparencies, smearing them, but work well on any card or paper stock you run through them, as the paper path is nearly straight. they also are exactly the same cost per page, so I almost always would print anything as white or coloured images on a solid black (at least to the page borders) background.
Still got one in the garage, but as the wax blocks were over $100 per colour, for 3 blocks, or a month's supply in standby, I have not powered it for a decade. Got plenty of black though, I have been using them as candles, just stick a hole in the middle, and put in a wick.
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Thanks for the info!! Sadly, there is very little technical info on these things available online.
A bit of research says that the regular A4 size models had 440 nozzles per color.
How much do the heads move? From illustrations, it’s clear it’s page-wide, so 440 nozzles for a color, onto roughly 8.25” wide paper, works out to about 50dpi, which would mean 12 rotations to achieve the normal 600dpi print output. So does the head, in essence, just wiggle over a total of 1/50” in 1/600” steps? Given the high print speeds, this must mean the drum is rotating at a ferocious rate, explaining why the page is ultimately ejected with such enthusiasm!
I remember how much wax they used on startup. (And the free black.) As I stated earlier, this made them wholly unsuitable for anything other than workgroups, where it’d get used regularly and never, ever turned off.
Odd that you had smearing on transparencies. The ones I saw come out of these were flawless. (But like color laser transparencies, almost worthless, since the opacity of the color pigments meant that a colorful transparency still appeared nearly black and white when projected! Aqueous inkjet with dye inks is far better for this.)
tooki:
--- Quote from: GlennSprigg on April 02, 2020, 01:00:18 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on April 02, 2020, 11:32:56 am ---
--- Quote from: jfiresto on April 01, 2020, 10:38:07 am ---
--- Quote from: tooki on April 01, 2020, 10:23:42 am ---... I pulled out the small B&W laser (also a classifieds freebie) that I have for PCB making, only to discover that in the probably 2-3 years it was sitting in the cupboard, the imaging drum has gone bad — it has a horizontal stripe across the drum, presumably from the prolonged contact with another roller....
--- End quote ---
Are you sure it was not (not so) prolonged light pollution?
--- End quote ---
Definitely sure it wasn’t. The printer was in a closed cardboard box, and the cartridge was inside the printer. No way for light to get in. Before going into the box, it worked flawlessly.
The damage to the drum is mechanical: it’s a roughened (textured) line about 1.5mm thick. So it’s not just desensitization of the photosensitive coating.
(It’s a moot point anyway at this point: the printer subsequently decided to commit suicide by wrapping an A5 sheet of toner transfer paper around the fuser drum, and the rotations ironed it down nice and tight. No idea why it choked on the A5, since that is a supported paper size, and it had no trouble with the A4 sheets of transfer paper. In the process of removing that mess, I caused a few scratches to the fuser drum’s Teflon coating. On paper, that just causes very minor flaws, but on toner transfer paper, where toner adhesion is deliberately weak, it tears off chunks of toner. :/ Luckily this thing was a freebie I didn’t pay one cent for!)
--- End quote ---
Re: your last paragraph. While recently looking at glossy paper options, especially when people so often now want to print PCB circuits, I was warned to never use paper meant for an InkJet printer, (has a special coating for ink absorption), as the Laser printers have way too much heat and can melt that coating! Don't know if this applies to you or not?
--- End quote ---
Definitely not. I said “toner transfer paper” because I bought toner transfer paper made specifically for this purpose. It’s paper with one side laminated with a non-stick coating that just baaaarely holds onto the fused toner. So when you then use a laminator to apply it to the PCB, the toner adheres to the copper and readily releases from the transfer paper.
(From my writings on printers, including the replies in this thread, I’d think it was obvious that I have more than a passing understanding of printer technologies, and certainly would know not to use inkjet photo papers in a laser printer. ;) )
GlennSprigg:
Sorry... :-[
Am only online every few days and can't read everything. ^-^
Hope you and your family are safe in these troubled times!!
tooki:
--- Quote from: GlennSprigg on April 06, 2020, 11:55:45 am ---Sorry... :-[
Am only online every few days and can't read everything. ^-^
Hope you and your family are safe in these troubled times!!
--- End quote ---
Thank you, you as well!
I’m fortunate that my home electronics lab is reasonably well equipped (both in equipment and parts), so rather than going into work, I can do it from home. (I’m interning at a vocational school before beginning an apprenticeship as an electronics technician in the fall.)
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