Envelope printer suggestions?

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2007, Steve Wiltsie wrote:
>I have a customer that prints from just a few to up to 1000 envelopes at a 
>time.  For the last 7 or so years they have been using a Lexmark T616TN with 
>an envelope feeder and a third 500 sheet tray.   The printer is connected to 
>their network and is used by their SCO Unix system and Windows 2000 server. 
>Recently the Lexmark died and the repair 'expert' was unable to fix it or 
>even get the tools to fix it.  In any case, the customer decided it was time 
>to get a new laser printer.  I provided an HP LaserJet 4350TN with an 
>envelope feeder and third 500 sheet tray - exactly the same configuration as 
>the Lexmark.  It is plugged into the network and prints fine - except for 
>envelopes.  The 4350 is rated at about 55 pages per minute but is only 
>printing envelopes at about 6ppm!!  I've been on Live Chat with HP Tech 
>Support and on the phone with the customer a good part of the day trying to 
>figure out what is wrong.  For one thing, HP TS old me I shouldn't be 
>sharing the printer from the Windows 2000 server but rather should load the 
>software on each PC and set up the IP port printing on each one.  They went 
>on to say that print jobs "can become corrupted" when printed from a server 
>sharing the printer.  That was news to me.  They also said that the laser 
>printer shouldn't be plugged into a surge protector because that could 
>somehow provide less electricity than just plugging it into the wall.  More 
>news.

I have a customer who prints thousands of auction flyers which
are typically more difficult to handle than plain envelopes.
They're using a Pitney Bowes printer which handles them very well
from a Linux system via parallel port.

I think it's a Pitney Bowes 600.

It's basically simple to use, taking ascii text of some specified number of
lines per label.  I have a simple perl script that extracts information
from a database formatting the lines, eliminating blanks, and padding to
the proper number of lines per document.  It automatically handles the
postal bar codes as well.

Being Pitney Bowes, I doubt that it's cheap, but it's a workhorse, and has
not had any serious problems that I've heard of.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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