Five interesting printer facts

Five interesting printer facts

1, Laser printers use toner and work using the Xerography method. This was invented by Chester Carlson (Wasn't he in the Goonies?) in 1938. At first, no one wanted to buy Chester's idea and he was rejected over and over until the Haloid company (later to become Xerox Corp) agreed to partner with Chester and in 1950, the first of Carlson's "Xerox" machines went on sale in the USA.

2, Johannes Gutenberg was the father of modern printing and invested the “Gutenbeg Press” in circa 1440, a full 500 years before the first Xerox machine went on sale. Gutenberg also pioneered the use of oil based ink which is more stable then water based ink solutions. This was the forerunner to the kinds of inks that are used in today’s inkjet printers.

3, There are usually 2 types of printer cartridge for each printer. The printer usually comes fitted with a low capacity or starter cartridge. These are often only ten to fifty percent full. Imagine a seven hundred and fifty CL bottle of wine with only one hundred CL of wine, this is essentially what you are getting from a low capacity cartridge. Now this is ok if you hardly ever print as the starter cartridges are less expensive but when you compare the price millilitre by millilitre then they are more expensive on the whole. To give you an idea of the difference in price , we’ll take an example of a popular cartridge – the HP 350 (low or standard capacity) and the Hp 350XL (high capacity). Using the prices from www.coloursave.com, the standard capacity original cartridge comes in at £15.95 for 4.5ml and the high capacity xl version is £27.95 for 25ml. So to compare the two cartridges millilitre for millilitre, the standard is £3.54 per ml and the XL cartridge is £1.11 per ml. So the XL cartridge is a far more economical cartridge and offers a better longer term investment.

4, Approximately 3-4 litres of crude oil is used in the manufacture of each toner cartridge. If these are not recycled then they can end up in rubbish tips. Toners and inkjets can take thousands of year to biodegrade and cause pollution. Sadly, only around 25% of cartridges are recycled each year worldwide (more than twenty five million are dumped in the UK alone), but the good news is that this number has increased from about 10% ten years ago.

5, According to the UK Cartridge Remanufacturers Association (UKCRA), the UK remanufacturing industry provides 1,500,000 remanufactured cartridges to the public each year. In addition, the UK imports 10 million laser toner cartridges and 30 million inkjet cartridges annually. The recycler website cites a 2003 MPA market research report as stating that this number equates to a market of over 1.5 billion pounds.