Online Labels Forum

Oh My Dog!!!!! We absolutely love the silver poly labels for looks and weatherproof qualities. BUT...... We have killed 4 (expensive) all in one printers, including two that were rated "commercial" with a "standard" volume of up to 30000 sheets per month. The heads get clogged, they get too hot, they smear the ink..... Within 3 months they are garbage. We only print about 50 sheets a month, so we are not talking that large a volume.
So, we started taking them to Office Depot, with their super fabulous expensive printers, and paying them to print our labels. I was banned within 2 weeks. The sheets, even when fed one at a time would get stuck halfway through the printer. The toner was not fused properly. Sometimes a sheet would get scrunched up in the guts of the thing.
I HAD to find a solution. BTW, yes, we know that Online Labels does print labels, but guess what? They do NOT print the poly sheets in silver. Wonder why?
I read everywhere that I could find on Google for a solution to my problem, and other than spending a buck or more per label to have some silk screened labels done, the best I could find was what had been posted here. HP Laser Printer NP125F3CF. It is a commercial grade printer, about 450 bucks worth, and all it does is print. I figured I would have to find space for it somewhere...I shopped, found a refurbished one for 122.00 plus 20 bucks shipping. Deal. It arrived. I loaded silver in it. It takes forever- about 30 seconds per page after thinking about whether or not it is going to print for a minute or so. Perhaps for that reason it has absolutely no problems printing the poly sheets.We have done about 150 sheets so far with no drop off of quality, no fading, streaking, smudging. Besides that I get the absolutely most awesome colors out of that thing. I just THOUGHT our labels were gorgeous before.
I recommend this printer to anyone having fits with their current printer for both white and silver poly sheets.

Cannon MF731CDW was the latest one. It took about 4 months to kill it. We used label setting, thick paper setting (heavy bond), and several others. Tried feeding manually. What worked best was placing one sheet of Poly label, then one sheet of plain paper in the paper tray, and laboriously printing one sheet of labels, then one sheet of plain paper on which I had simply written a period (.).... Needless to say that was agony, but at least it did not stick poly pages together and slide all over and jam. What happened after a couple more months was that the heads got so glopped up (best technical terminology I know) with ink that they would not clean, would not "act right" and are now printing nasty streaks on everything- we use that printer only for in house use stuff.
Could not tell you what we tried before that or the one before that because I am pretty good about removing printers that no longer exist from my printer list on my computer.
I do not know what Office Depot uses, but the max we got out of it was about 5 pages before the printer jammed, usually between ink application and ink fuser. The nice lady would pull the sheet out, wipe the unfused ink off, and then try it again. Every 6 or 7 tries it would scrunch up the label sheet so it was unusable, and this must have happened early in the guts of the machine, because those sheets did not have any ink on them. I was soon labeled "persona non grata" at Office Depot... (we live in a small town, so all 4 people who work in copy knew me).... The next closest Office Depot is about 42 miles away. Figured it was cheaper to try a different printer, and I read what I found here on your forum, and made my choice.
We only use the silver poly and white poly labels for our jars and bottles. The white ones work a LOT better without jamming, but I am unwilling to switch to the white labels for our products because, let's face it, the silver ones are adorable. Therefore, as much as I kvetch about the trials and tribulations of printing on silver, it is worth it!