Or in this case a new printer. I had our sales girl ask me that today and wanted to know when they started to do that. I informed her that envelopes have been wrinkling going through these laser copiers/printers pretty much since the first time anyone fed one through. She then wanted to know why nobody told her that and then why do they have the envelope option to choose from in the print driver. Well I had to tell her I didn't engineer the device and she would have to make a phone call to Japan to have that question answered. What envelopes are your customers using that work the best? We had one customer that switched to using Quill #10 for Laser Printers and they seem to run through the best with the least amount of wrinkling occcuring and they tend not the skew at all like some envelopes do.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: elheather,

I had a school admin office that used their Sharp AR-M450N MFP primarily for printing envelopes. Surprisingly, we had very few problems until someone got creative and ordered glossy coated envelopes which would coat the feed tires with grey sludge within 50 prints and then misfeed until cleaned. Fortunately for me, they only bought a couple hundred of them. The first three times I advised against using those envelopes. On the fourth visit I made the rest of the problem envelopes disappear.

This was a great test situation, though. The more expensive watermarked, letterhead, or bond envelopes wrinkled the worst. I had the best results with the red label Staples brand cheap envelopes. The thing to watch for is flatness. If the media shows the "potato chip" effect, it will most certainly wrinkle and jam. If you reverse the natural curl until it lays flat, it will feed fine for 10 minutes or so, but will revert to its normal state soon enough.

Any time you feed two layers of paper simultaneously through the fuser it is likely to wrinkle. The only thing worse than envelopes is labels & transparencies.

We tell them to use only a straight flap envelope. I don't know why they complain so much about this when the envelope goes through the US Postal they look like crap anyway. I love it when they say "well my HP 4200 doesn't do it" and I think to my self "Well your HP goes through fusers like I go through Marlboros". Needless to say, they may wrinkle but it is faster than labels.

Doedee316

had a customer once with an analog Ricoh. Ran the envelopes with the brass hook on the back and wondered why the machine often jammed in the fuser and they got a weird blur as the brass tab would catch on the t/s assembly, stall and short out.
Customers.....
Z

Moisture content also is a problem.

Envelopes aren't sealed up like paper is.

Envelopes have air inside of them. When going thru the fuser all the air gets squezed to one end and then you get the wrinkling problem. Lexmark printers have a solinoid on the fuser that will push the lower fuser roller up and down to push out the air. HP printers have flaps on the fusers to lower the bottem fuser roller so there is not as much pressure. But there is no cure all. Quility of paper is most important.