SURVEY: People Using Printer Cartridges For Leisure More Than At Work

As technology has made working from home as easy as it has ever been—with high-speed connections, video chat platforms and cloud-based networking—the modern home office needs little more than a laptop, a few printer cartridges, some paper and of course the printer. So when PC Advisor released the results of a survey this month, probing respondents on how they use their home printer, the results came as a surprise to bloggers and even some printer and ink cartridge manufacturers.

The survey, sponsored by Kodak, asked: ‘Who in your household uses your home printer the most?.’ 60 percent of respondents selected ‘Me or my partner – for leisure’. The other options were ‘Me or my partner – for work’; ‘Kids – for leisure’; ‘Kids – for homework/college’; and ‘Other family/friends’.

Tech reporters at PC Advisor have a number of theories as to why so many people are eschewing the home office printer in favor of a more fun, photo-friendly printing option. In an increasingly digital world, the UK tech publication posits, many of our business documents—from contracts to boarding passes—have come online, to our phones or onto a growing number of tablet devices, reducing the need to fire up the printer and waste our precious printer ink.

Like many paper-based office practices, photo developing has gone digital as well, creating an entirely new segment of photo printing technology. Gone are the days of developing rolls of film and waiting for the guy at the corner drug store. Today, many printer owners are printing their own photos from home and getting instant access to their memories in the process. Printers have become more adept at printing photos, creating more vivid colours and better resolutions to handle top-flight digital cameras with high mega-pixel images.

While the home office is still a reality in many homes, most business people are leaving their business printing tasks at headquarters and saving their paper and printer ink for fun.

Exploring Printer Ink Colour Combinations

While printer ink may be just a line item on your budget, the way these inks work together can help you understand what you are loading into your printer every month. With a few tweaks and additions, you could save on ink cartridges and waste less toner.
Printers typically utilize variations on the three primary colours. These colours are typically Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), and Yellow (yellow). By understanding how these three work together, you can make more informed printing decisions.

Black: Black is made by combining all other colours until no one single colour can be reflected back to the eye. By combining all three primary colours in equal amounts, printers can create a colour similar to black. But because this is a crude combination, prints can often come out brown or grey. That is why, when your black printer cartridge is low, your prints come out grey. Printer cartridges come in black as well and most offices utilize black ink for their prints to create more brilliant blacks. Some offices, however, don’t need many documents to go out of the office and therefore choose to simply allow the typical CMY group to get the job done. This is not typically recommended, as black ink creates a more preferable, legible print. Black is abbreviated as K, which stands for Kohle, the German word for coal. This is so the colour spectrum RGB (Red, Green, Blue) will not be confused with the normal printer spectrum of CMYK.

Cyan: As a blue with some green in it, Cyan is used largely as a subtractive colour, removing brightness from colours, rather than adding it. It is critical to creating shadow and expressing the darker end of the colour palette. Cyan can come as its own cartridge or in a combined CMY ink cartridge.

Magenta: Unlike Cyan, Magenta contains no green at all but does contain a bit of blue. It is a subtractive colour also but helps push prints towards the middle of the colour scale. This colour can also come on its own or in a combined cartridge with Cyan and Yellow.

Yellow: Perhaps the most complex colour in the primary scale, Yellow is a blueless colour that absorbes all wavelengths of blue from light. It can mix with blue to create green at the darker end of the spectrum, but can also be combined in light or heavy doses to create a wide range of colours on the brighter end of the spectrum. This colour can appear in printers on its own or combined with Cyan and Magenta.

Samsung Makes After-Market Printing Chips Obsolete

While many printer ink and toner cartridges have become interchangeable, no matter what printer your office uses, after-market printer chip providers have made a business out of helping you keep your printer current with modern technology. But with the release of a new printer, technology manufacturer Samsung seeks to make after-market printer chips obsolete.
The printer is known as the Samsung ML1640,1660, 1915 series. These models include a new feature know as “Stealthware,” designed to automatically activate new firmware features based on set time frames. This design hopes to help users stay current with modern print technology.
The Stealthware system can be tailored to fit with any printer platform and can be set to update due to an internal time clock, page count, calendar date and more.

As their printers age, some customers worry that page yields will suffer. Now, with automatically updating firmware, printers will stay relevant longer, causing these concerns to grow. Many office professionals don’t realize that printer cartridges are designed to cover only 5 percent per page. If you are printing a lot of pictures, graphics and large logos, you may use up ink cartridges faster than a printer used strictly for printing text documents. Customers concerned about page yields as their hardware ages should talk to their local printer ink specialist, bringing an example of a typical print project.

As technology makes printers last longer, business owners and workers should keep an eye on their printer performance to ensure that they are still getting the best out of their equipment.

New Technology Syncs Printers With Mobile Devices

With mobile technology bringing everything from books and newspapers to legal briefs and contracts online, the need for paper has diminished in places like the school and the office. But for some, the need or even want for actual paper and printing is not going away any time soon. For those still loving their printer cartridges and paper trays, new technologies are making it easier to get hard copies from tablets and mobile phones.

The Little Printer: London-based design team Berg has partnered with some of the world’s largest companies to release a prototype called the “Little Printer.” The machine takes up as much room on your shelf as an alarm clock but wirelessly connects with a smartphone app to pull a number of daily factoids from your personal web (upcoming birthdays from Facebook, agendas for the day from your address book) and print them into a handy little receipt for quick perusal. Sporting a tiny ink cartridge and wi-fi router, the device is little more than a few components and a faceplate yet can be completely controlled from your phone. According to tech blog CNet, the Little Printer is a marketing tool for Berg’s newest concept, BergCloud. This online ecosystem would allow you to control an array of household items from your mobile device.

All-in-1 Printers: The self-contained printer-scanner-fax combo is so 2007. Today’s all-in-one printers—like the Kodak Hero 9.1 released this week—offer more than the average home office staple. From wireless connectivity over your office network to ordering double-sided prints from your mobile device to even receiving printer ink refill warnings to your phone, these printers create a more complete office eco-system. You can also print from the Google Cloud, swap back and forth between photo paper and regular documents with ease and even print 3-D pictures and video captures. The Hero and printers like it are connecting the digital world with the tactile world like never before.

Australia Post Celebrates National Recycling Week By Repurposing Printer Cartridges As Pens

Australian parcel service Australia Post goes through a lot of ink cartridges, printing shipping labels and work orders for packages across the nation. But this year, the company hoped to make more from printer cartridges than a few extra deliveries. To celebrate National Recycling Week, Australia Post partnered with environmental non-profit Planet Ark to recycle used ink cartridges into pens.

The Enviroliner felt tip pen is made from more than 95 per cent of recycled plastics and inks, with one cartridge making two pens. Each person who donated a printer cartridge to the cause got to take the pens home as souvenirs, giving the ink and plastic new life.

Project organizers released a statement, saying the project was designed to combat e-waste; the disposal of technology items that may contain harmful chemicals and can harm the groundwater around landfills. Mobile phones, computers, tube televisions and printer ink can all add toxins like mercury and lead to the environment if not disposed of properly. Planet Ark’s campaign manager Brad Gray stated that one third of people still throw printer cartridges in their home trash.

“By making e-waste recycling so accessible Australia Post is helping to encourage more and more people to get involved,” said Mr. Gray.

Beyond just pens, printer and toner cartridges collected by the program will be used in a variety of ways. Some will be returned to their original manufacturers so they can be refilled and parts can be repurposed. The remaining cartridges will be converted into new products such as pens, park benches and rulers.

HP Takes Digital Printing Innovations On The Road In The UK

With a cadre of new innovations and a rock-star-style tour bus, printer ink and technology retailer HP is hitting the road, bringing printer and printer cartridge demos to destinations across the UK.

According to a statement released by HP this week, its branded truck will make eight stops between November 15th and December 2nd to showcase faster printers, more graphics capabilities and simpler HP ink cartridges.

HP will kick-off the roadshow at Sandown Park, in Esher, hitting London and Manchester along the way. The tour will also stop in Scotland; hitting the Midlands and Edinburgh. The tour concludes in Ireland with stops in Belfast and Dublin and, like true rockstars of the printing world, the tour finishes with a stadium: Curvaheen Park Stadium in Cork.

With a host of new innovations to introduce to its customers, the tradeshow will focus on recent speed upgrades for HPs T200 Inkjet Web Press, as well as the clearer graphics offered by new ink cartridges and delivery systems, introduced at tradeshows throughout this year. HP believes the faster, more efficient printers can help businesses increase profits and fill more orders, keeping up with the faster pace of commerce.

“As the graphics market shifts from analogue to digital printing, we are helping print service providers grow their businesses with new capabilities, enabling them to expand into new application areas and improve delivery times for high-volume digital printing,” Jan Riecher, vice president and general manger in graphic solutions business at HP, said Friday.