The Xerox Phaser series of printers have been providing small to mid-sized businesses with quality printing supplies for many years. The Phasers offer a wide variety of printers for various functions, from multi-purpose printers, copiers and fax machines to high quality printing perfect for graphic arts and visual media. Xerox Phaser ink can be divided into two categories by the type of printer model purchased: toner ink for the laser printers, designed for small but frequent print jobs, and the solid ink sticks best used in color printing for graphics and photos.

When it comes to the former case buying Xerox Phaser ink can be a fairly expensive endeavor. Replacement toner cartridges are far from cheap despite having a 2,000-5,000 page capacity, particularly if purchased from the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), Xerox. This price can be reduced by a great deal if you choose to buy third part “compatible” cartridges, so named due to being designed to fit the OEM specifications in order to be compatible with select models of printers. That price can be reduced even further by purchasing a refill kit and adding the toner to your empty cartridge on your own; although this method is discouraged by the manufacturer and can even void your warranty in some locations.

Fortunately the solid ink printers offer a much cheaper option for purchasing Xerox ink. Each solid ink stick sells for between $20 to $30 and is capable of printing about 1,000 pages each, making it the best option for affordable ink. Many outlets market the solid ink printer as having high quality color printing for black and white prices. Even better, solid ink sticks are not housed in the plastic and metal cartridges that toner is, which cuts down on the amount of pollution that these printers generate.

The Hewlett Packard LaserJet 3600 printer has proven to be an all-around dependable machine for small businesses or private use. The printing speed and memory capacity are both high enough to satisfy the most demanding office environments despite keeping a reasonable price tag, and with a printing speed of 17 pages per minute at 600 x 600 dpi resolution this printer promises to handle nearly any task your office can dream up. Even better, the advanced ColorSphere technology of the LaserJet 3600 toner cartridges provides you with the same high printing quality from beginning to end, with the last page you print just as vibrant and colorful as the first.

Each ColorSphere LaserJet 3600 toner cartridge can print about four thousand pages at 5% coverage for cyan, magenta and yellow toner colors, and the black toner can print upwards of six thousand pages before needing replacement. This is a significant increase over competitive toner cartridges produced by other original equipment manufacturers or generic compatible cartridges, which usually range somewhere around two thousand pages or less. The LaserJet 3600 is also capable of handling an astounding fifty-thousand page monthly duty cycle and has an appropriately large paper input capacity to match.

With an embedded Ethernet print server the LaserJet 3600 is also extremely convenient for moderate sized work groups and mid-sized offices, or you can connect directly to the printer via a high speed USB 2.0 port. This ease of operation is also extended to the maintenance of the machine, and the four LaserJet 3600 toner cartridges can be easily removed and replaced at a momentÂ’s notice. With so many advantages on such a reasonably priced high quality printer it is easy to see why Hewlett Packard has become a leading printing supply company, and how the LaserJet 3600 will become a printing standard for years to come.

If you have been looking on the internet to buy a new ink cartridge or to find a toner cartridge recycling service the chances are that you have seen a number of blogs preaching the gospel of recycling your old cartridges. The blogs are generally fairly similar: save money by recycling your cartridge! Reuse old cartridges to save the environment! Yet few of those blogs dedicate much detail to how cartridge recycling actually works.

This is a real shame, since overall it is a very simple process. To begin with, despite what you might be told by larger printing companies the average toner cartridge is built fairly well, with parts that are highly unlikely to break down after running out of ink for the first time. In fact, pretty much all cartridges can be reused several times before finally getting thrown away or recycled.

In years past toner cartridge recycling was simply a matter of unplugging the rubber stopper on the built-in hole in the cartridge and pouring in new toner. Over the years the major brand names phased these refill holes out, so now consumers need to make their own in order to reuse their cartridges. This is accomplished by taking a soldering iron or other hot metal and melting a hole through the top of the toner cartridge into the main compartment. Using a drill could leave plastic flakes in your toner and reduce the quality of your printing. Once the new hole has cooled just pour in some new toner and reseal the hole with duct tape or something similar, insert the cartridge into your printer, and voila! You’re done.

Some companies have resorted to the particularly pernicious use of installing computer chips in their cartridges that prevent you from refilling and reusing them. Don’t worry, if your toner cartridge has one of these chips then just invest in one of the cartridge refill kits sold on the internet. These kits not only include the tools you need to make a new refill point, but also come with replacement chips to bypass that pesky chip requirement.

Long before you ever set foot in a store it is a very wise idea to take some time to research the products that you want to buy. In the case of buying a toner cartridge, articles are an especially useful tool to educate yourself in ways to buy high quality products and still save money. The advice you will find on a toner blog, while not as empirical as peer-reviewed publications or better business association announcements, do represent a wide range of creative solutions and wisdom gained from personal and professional experience available to the public at no cost.

The first, most basic thing that toner cartridge articles will teach you is which products to buy in order to save money. There are multiple types of toner cartridges, and quite a bit of price variation between them. Bloggers offer accessible guideposts to navigate your way through these sometimes harsh seas.

Online bloggers have also been taking the lead in advocating environmentally friendly solutions to the problem of toner cartridge waste and pollution by suggesting innovative ways to recycle and reuse old ink cartridges instead of throwing them away. Many companies have built in safeguards to prevent consumers from reusing their products, thus ensuring a steady flow of income from people buying new cartridges when the old one is empty. Yet this business model produces an enormous amount of waste, and has served to drive the price of a toner cartridge through the roof in recent years. Toner articles have circumvented these measures and offered detailed descriptions about the best methods or kits for do-it-yourself refills, and have championed cartridge recycling programs.

That is just a small sampling of the benefits you will find by turning to the blogging community for advice before you go to buy your next toner cartridge. Log onto the internet and find out for yourself how broad and deep the river of information about toner cartridges really is.

The Phaser 8500 is an affordable solid ink printer manufactured by Xerox best suited for small to mid-sized office environments. Although solid ink printers are marketed as having better saturation and consistency in printing, this model printer produces moderate quality print jobs that may not compare well to a laser printer. However, the Xerox 8550 Ink sticks are incredibly affordable, especially when compared to laser printing toner.

Like many other solid ink printers the Phaser 8550 has varied printing performance: it produces high quality graphics and colored print jobs, but does slightly less well when printing text. Xerox 8550 ink works especially well when used to print photos, particularly when using the printer’s photo mode.

Xerox ink is incredibly affordable when stacked against replacement cartridges for other printer units, from inkjet cartridges to laser printing toner. Each individual unit is a solid piece of ink that is melted down and sprayed onto the paper by the machine, and is capable of yielding about 1,000 pages per ink stick. The stick sells for between $20 and $30 on average, depending on color or black ink is chosen. This style of printer has an additional advantage of creating far less waste and environmental impact than a toner printer, which usually carry metal and plastic cartridges that weigh several pounds and can take centuries to break down and decompose.

Deciding whether or not the Phaser 8550 is the proper printer for you ultimately boils down to how you plan to use it. Since it is an older model that uses cheaper inks to function and includes many standard features that are usually considered option on other models it could be a good starting printer for a college student or a small graphic artist, or it might work well in an office setting that occasionally does some in-house

Each year the United States alone disposes roughly 900 million pounds of toner cartridges into landfills across the country, and each one of those cartridges can take anywhere from 400 to 1,000 years to break down. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that those numbers are bad news, but the picture looks even worse when you realize that 97% of that waste could be reused through toner cartridge recycling. In other words, we’re polluting the planet with perfectly good cartridges.

The simple fact that recycling those old toner cartridges helps reduce our impact on the environment should be enough reason to recycle for most people, but the truth is that it isn’t. What does tend to turn heads, however, is finding out that there is money in reusing those old cartridges. There are tons of companies that will pay you to return used toner cartridges to them. The price rate varies based on condition and manufacturer, but it doesn’t take much to start running to various offices in your neighborhood and encourage them to give you their old cartridges instead of throwing them away.

The money behind toner recycling is evidence of the last strong argument in favor or reusing them, specifically that the recycling industry creates jobs and helps to stimulate the economy. The U.S. has been going through a period of economic upheaval since 2008, and every new job makes a difference. How many new jobs could be created by recycling all of those hundreds of millions of cartridges that get thrown away?

Next time your office printer needs to have its toner replaced remember what you’ve learned about the value of toner cartridge recycling and don’t let the empty cartridge get thrown away! There’s good money and sound policy in reusing them for those who are clever enough to make use of the opportunity.

Social media, and blogging in particular, has radically changed the way we get information in the modern era. Blogging gives the average person access to a worldwide dialogue on particular subjects or issues that can act as a fantastic educational resource, such as when a consumer reads toner cartridge articles before choosing to buy a new ink cartridge for the office printer.

When it comes to ink and toner specifically, blogs become particularly useful tools. Anyone who has ever shopped for toner is familiar with the exorbitant prices many companies charge for their products–with ink prices often rivaling or surpassing luxury wines for the same volume of liquid. Thus the first, perhaps most common use of toner cartridge articles reveals itself: finding different ways to save money. Toner blogs have discussed the issue of ink pricing at length, and have come up with several different solutions and alternative ideas to save you money while stimulating the industry.

Reading toner cartridge articles will also give you access to tons of product feedback, as the blogging sphere has evolved into one of the most effective forms of independent quality control in the world. If a product is a bad deal or poor quality you can be assured that there are dozens of articles about it on the internet. This quality control aspect also bleeds into consumer advocacy, wherein the blogs act as a counterbalance to profit-driven corporations by reporting on price inflation and shady practices.

Lastly, toner blogs are a great way for you to get involved and have an impact on the industry. Blogs are an instant and easily accessible soap box that anyone can use to speak their mind and try to encourage change, and this is one of the factors that has helped make blogging so vitally important for innovation. Never sit back and read passively, always speak your mind and get involved.

The HP P1005 laserjet printer is a printer model produced by Hewlett Packard and manufactured by Canon that has been discontinued, but for those who still own one of these printers it is possible to find HP P1005 on the market in a variety of places. The first and most obvious place to look for a refill cartridge is from the Hewlett Packard online store, where you can buy a replacement cartridge with a 1,500 page capacity for about $70, or a 3,000 page cartridge for about $120.

However, as most veteran printing companies can tell you buying directly from the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) can in fact be unnecessarily expensive. The prices you pay for each replacement HP P1005 toner cartridge can be so expensive that you end up paying more than the printer was worth in a surprisingly short amount of time. Yet do not fret, there are several other options available to find toner to keep your old printer running.

The easiest way to replace your HP toner for less money is to buy a refurbished toner cartridge from a third party source. These cartridges are called “compatible” cartridges because they are designed and built to the specifications of the original manufacturer, yet do not carry the logo or branding (and do not spend money on advertising the product like the OEM), thus saving you money. Some compatible cartridges are also made from recycled or refilled cartridge parts, helping to preserve the environment while saving you money.

Another common option is to refill the toner cartridge on your own. You can find several different refill kits for sale with easy to follow instructions for creating the refill hole and refilling the cartridge while maintaining the high quality printing of an OEM product. A quick internet search can tell you more about this option and show you places to purchase these products.

Businesses in America go through an astronomical number of toner cartridges for their printers every year, creating huge landfills of photocopier waste that take centuries to decompose. It is far past time for American companies to realize the insane amount of waste they are generating and work to increase toner cartridge recycling in their own offices. There are, of course, plenty of environmental reasons that illustrate the need for cartridge recycling. Each cartridge you throw away puts 2-3 pounds of plastic and metal pollutants into the earth and takes the better part of millennia to break down. Now consider that as a country we waste more than 300 million of these printer cartridges each year–that’s enough to line up end-to-end and build a bridge to the moon in under a decade.

Yet the advantages of toner cartridge recycling go far beyond just the environmental impact: the economic incentives are just as bountiful. Each toner cartridge thrown away contains about 97% reusable parts. Through a simple process of cleaning and replacing worn parts these cartridges can be refilled and resold at a fraction of the cost it takes to produce a new cartridge.

Toner cartridge recycling also has two long term economic benefits: conservation and stimulation. First, each time a 3 pound toner cartridge is recycled it conserves 5 to 9 pounds of virgin material that can be used for other products. Second, that recycling process necessitates businesses to re-manufacture the cartridges, and many recycling companies will pay consumers to turn in their cartridges. This creates local jobs in recycling those cartridges and selling them to the recycling plant.

There are no good reasons to throw away your toner cartridges when they are empty. It is simply cheaper and more environmentally friendly to either sell them to a recycling company, or to clean and refill them on your own. By taking that simple step you reduce prices, save money, create jobs during an economic recession, and help preserve the environment.

Reading toner cartridge articles is a smart way to learn more about printing products before you invest money in purchasing them. Various companies do their best to tell the public about their products, but the information that they disclose is biased towards making a sale. However, the blogging community presents a public review and discourse on the industry as a whole, acting both as a promulgator of good ideas and a watchdog or consumer advocate to keep businesses in check.

Printing supplies like ink and toner are notorious for being drastically overpriced, particularly when it comes to brand name products. But for first time printing shoppers a quick visit to some toner cartridge articles could mean the difference between paying $50 for a new brand name cartridge or finding trustworthy generic products for only $15. These helpful little services might seem quirky at first, but ultimately offer a great way to save money and get the most out of your printing supplies.

The advantages of reading toner articles go beyond simply finding good product reviews and learning about new innovations in the industry. Most toner blogs dedicate a few posts to discussing the cartridge recycling issue, and have served as a great platform to educate the public about the benefits of recycling or refilling their ink and toner cartridges instead of buying new ones. This consumer advocacy has increased awareness of the questionable role that corporations have had in driving up the prices on ink and toner, and have reduced the carbon footprint of the printing industry by increasing recycling worldwide with a combination of do-it-yourself advice and reviewing refill kits and recycling services.

Keep this in mind the next time you stumble across a blog about refillable toner cartridges or the computer chips that prevent reusing them. Many of these blogs are written by dedicated consumer advocates simply trying to ensure that we can enjoy high quality products for a reasonable price. Take some time and read what they have to say; who knows, it could save you money in the end.