Study: Laser printers may pose health risks

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this was the case at the time of copiers (because they were very expensive, so they had to be shared, and they were commonly placed in corridors below a ventilation because of their "odor".

Why not doing that with central shared printers. Today, this would even be cost effective: all proves that a central printer can save lot of money (in terms of renewal of disposable items and maintenance) and time (small printers are constantly out of paper, and people find themselves having to deblock the printer because the paper feeding is quite poor on desktop models made only with plastics, or wasting time to find ink recharges).

On the opposite, central printers are most often much faster than desktop models, and require very little maintenance. Their ussage cost is alsomuch smaller.

So this problem can be solved in offices. But what can you do at home where there's typically only one printer near you on your desktop or below it? You have the nose directly on it, and home ropms are typically smaller and less ventilated then work rooms.

The home desktop may even be within a bedroom, and the printer will beleft in standby mode for whole night, when your windowsare also closed, so you'll be exposed to the emanations of the printer. This remains true for inkjet printers as well, which are constantly evaporating some solvants in the air.

So what manufacturers must do: make sure that the printer enters really in a safe sleeping mode: the printer could even shut down completely automatically after some time until it is turned on again manually before use. Standby modes with active circuits are wrong, because they are made so that the printer can become ready in just a hanfdful of seconds, even if it hasbeen sleeping for many hours (or days...)

Lookat today's printers: there's not even a power off button! The printer is sleeping, and will even get itself into full power mode every fewdays to perform a cleaning operation: HP, Canon, Brother, ... all of them are doing that, despite it would be muchsafer just to have the printer protect its printing head within a hermetic box when sleeping (no need to perform regular cleaning operations,it canbe performed later at power on).

But really for work, such article should be enough to justify the need to abandon the costly individual printers on each desktop. Time to use the services of just a few central shared printers through the network.

Posted by: PhilippeV   Posted on: 08/01/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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