Ok, if you want to protect your hundred or maybe even thousand dollars invested in printer merchandise, follow this advice.

Even if you do not own a laser printer, and it's the one at work, if you insert a transparency or other plastic object into a laser printer..

IT WILL MELT INSIDE..

Do you have any bloody idea how bloody hot these bloody machines get?? It bloody well comes down to people like me, who do IT work that have to try to pull it out with a bloody x-acto blade and tweezers. (Only previously used for users who can't find the task bar or make a folder)

Be pro-active and use only a photocopier for this purpose. Actually why even bother... just use POWERPOINT...

That's what laser transparencies are for. They don't melt because they're designed for use in a laser printer.

The fusing unit of a normal copier can easily reach 180 degrees Celsius. Besides ruining your transparencies, you might also seriously damage the machine you used. Copy shops will merciless force you to pay for that, so the investment in heat-resistant transparencies is saving you money in the long run. Transparencies nowadays go the way of other outdated presentation media and are replaced by data projectors.

A word about the fusing unit :
After the toner has been transferred to the paper/transparency, it has to be melted onto the surface. One very easy way to do this is the use of a heat roller, which works like a very small version of the contraptions used to iron bed sheets. Another principle uses halogene lamps - with the disadvantage of the paper igniting in case of a paper jam. One old, magnetographic printer, the Bull MP6090 used three of those lamps and was equipped with tiny fire doors and a built-in vacuum cleaner.

On all the HP laserjet printers I have worked with, which is basicly any non-color Laserjet released in the last 6 years, each tray has 2 settings, one for paper size (Letter, A4) and one for paper type (Plain, Letterhead, Preprinted).

This is used by the printer to determine what tray to print from when receiving a printjob, but it also tells the printer to lower or raise its fuser temperature. The temperature is lowered a bit for transparancies and raised for rough, thicker paper.

BTW, to get toner out of clothing, wash it out with cold water. Don't put it in the washing machine, the warm water will fuse the toner to your clothes just like a laser printer does to paper.

Using too low a fuser temperture leads to improper fusing, where the toner can be wiped off the paper. When the temperature is to high, the paper will curl heavily, possibly burn a bit and in the case of transparancies, melt and wrap around the fuser.

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