Envelopes that you run through your laser printer look beautiful when they first come out. They look like they’ve traveled through a war zone, though, by the time the letter reaches its final destination. Here’s why: lasers use toner which is dropped onto the paper in small raised piles and then run through a fuser which heats the “pile” at about 400 degrees Fahrenheit, melting the toner to form raised letters. Feel an envelope or lasered sheet of paper and you’ll see what I mean. Now scrape that image with your fingernail. Some of the “fused” toner scrapes off.
Place two lasered envelopes together and rub them back and forth. Notice slightly cracked letters? Now imagine your envelope running through the Post Office’s automatic gizmos and scraping against the equipment and other envelopes along the path. I’ve sent some letters out that lost 50% of the image by the time they were received. Makes a lousy impression.
Solution: buy an inexpensive inkjet printer (cost under $100 for most printers). The inkjet imbeds the ink into the paper fibers and makes a much stronger and harder-to-damage impression.
Benefit #1: The laser printer’s heat tends to seal some envelopes as they run through the machine. Inkjet printers run at about room temperature and don’t accidentally seal the envelopes.
Benefit #2: Lasers will print envelopes at 4-8 pages/minute, less time out for jams on every fifth envelope. Inkjet printers have a straighter paper path (some allow you to feed from the back instead of a bottom paper tray) so they tend to jam less often. And a good inkjet printer will print 10-15 envelopes per minute.
Benefit #3: Cost. Laser envelopes eat up toner and wear down the cartridge’s drum (because the envelope is narrower you tend to get a toner build-up along the edges, which means you may get a “streaking” toner image near the edges when you switch to regular size paper). Envelopes cost about three cents each to laser (those toner cartridges are expensive). The most expensive inkjet cartridge should cost less than one cent per envelope (one $20.00 cartridge is good for at least 3,000 envelopes on most printers).
If you’re processing large quantities of envelopes, you might even want to consider a high speed inkjet printer from manufacturers like Rena. New ones cost $10,000 plus, but many of their older models are selling on eBay for under $1,000. The slowest Rena printer will print 3,000+ envelopes per hour. I’m using a high end Rena system (the Imager III) to print 20,000 envelopes per hour, but that’s overkill for most business (I run a mailshop so high speed printing is must for my work).
But please stay away from lasering your envelopes, especially if you want to have the mail read and delivered by the post office.
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