The folks over at PC World — the best PC magazine in the world, both expert and novice — advise keeping the printer powered up at all times: even when you absolutely do not intend to print anything. Keeping the printer ON at all times keeps those printheads clean, making it less likely to break. However, to maintain a healthier print head and use more effective ink, leaving the printer on is better. Shut down your printer often, and you end up fouling your printing system — which you will need to clean, losing ink in the process.
Using ink to clean the printhead is essential for maintaining your printer and making sure that it lasts, but sometimes the maintenance cycles can happen more frequently than needed. Printing a single page… Printer stops.. Printing a single page… Printer stops Instead of running continuous print jobs long enough, components may wear out, as the printer rotates components to perform the cleaning cycle prior to every print job. Nothing uses less power than ON, but then you will need to remember to power on it before printing jobs. In an energy saving, a printer uses 1.2 Watts.. So power costs are no reason to turn it off manually.
I noticed that in the power saving mode, the printer reacts almost instantly when I send it a print job. When asleep, the laser printer is powered all >way down, save the same bare minimum of power required to keep >the circuitry alive which is looking for the print order coming in. You are not going and hitting the power strip switch or something, or > any of those main power buttons on your TVs (sometimes called a vacation buttons,) are you. The laser printer is not any different. I think I would suggest that they should quit turning off the printer at all times using the main power switch, since that is not how it was designed to be used.
I would guess that long term, if its an older printer with no standby/low power sleep mode, that you are better off just turning it off. I am not sure if disconnecting your printer completely from the power each day is such a great idea — as you need a lot more time in the morning to get printing going, and probably lose tons of money doing additional maintenance. I >> always switched off ALL of my Inkjet Printers each evening, or whenever I >> did not expect to be using it for several hours. The modern > >HP printers that have been able to be powered > off are all set into Sleep Mode — the same way that the most recent VCRs that you will have able to > have been powered off are in Sleep Mode.
You may keep your Solid Ink devices powered on during the workweek, and turn them off at weekends, if you do, except for one. If you plan on using multiple printers, you will have to run test prints on both, and may have to adjust each. I specifically recall playing around with paper type/material settings when setting up your printers and doing a few test runs of labels, though I cannot recall how, nor can I find out how to adjust those settings now.
The last possibility is that there is a mismatch between your label materials and the printer/inks that you are using; inks are of slightly different compositions, and this could cause large variations in printing quality. Because the laser print process requires heat, many labels designed specifically to work with a laser printer will have some humidity in them, which helps to keep the toner stuck in place; if your labels were stored improperly, it is possible they dried out, which could result in toner rubbing off after print. Inkjet printers use water-based inks, meaning if your print comes in contact with water or another liquid, it will either bleed through or smudge.