Many people don’t think that choosing the right printer paper could be the cause of their printer issues. However, when using low-quality oil or gas in your car can create maintenance issues, using low-quality paper can do the same thing with your laser printer.
With today’s low-cost, high-performance laser printers, you can produce highly detailed documents for the fraction of the cost. Many people make the mistake of using inexpensive copy paper to print their documents on. They don’t realize that this perceived up-front savings in paper expense can actually cost them more in the long run.
Using inexpensive, low-quality printer paper in your laser printer for anything but for quick printouts can cause miss-feeds, bunching and paper jams. This not only holds up your printing job, it wastes, toner, paper, and can damage your printer.
Using low-quality printer paper will also produce low-quality printouts. If you want to make a great impression with your print jobs and have your printer last longer without issues, you should carefully choose a paper grade that fits your particular project and printer specifications.
You should not only use quality printer paper, but you must make sure to get the correct paper for your printer. Using inkjet only labeled paper in a laser printer can actually damage your laser printer.
Most inkjet papers have a special coating on them to help the paper absorb the right amount of ink. This very coating that helps your inkjet prints come out clean and sharp keeps laser toner from adhering to the paper. Laser printers don’t use ink to print, they use toner. The toner is rolled onto a drum then heated and applied to the paper where it melts to form to your document. If the coating is slick enough the toner will not adhere completely to the coated inkjet paper.
The inkjet paper coating can also melt while going through the fuser in the laser printer which can damage it severely. Some of the coatings have polyester properties that can melt in the heat of the laser printer.
The melting coating can damage the laser printer’s fuser, drums, and many other parts of the printer. These parts are costly to fix and some parts of your printer may be beyond all repair which will result in you having to purchase a whole new printer.
These warnings are not only for matte inkjet papers but for glossy papers as well. Using glossy inkjet paper in a laser printer can be worse than using matte inkjet paper in a laser printer because the glossy paper usually has more coating than the matte papers.
Remember that laser printers run hot, inkjet does not. The temperature and the use of ink or toner are the key differences between inkjet and laser printers. Some papers are specially designed to work well with each type of printer.
It’s a lot less expensive to buy the correct printer paper for your machine than risk damaging your printer with the wrong kind or low-quality printer paper.
