[Melissa Siobhan]

Do any of you have recommendations for an envelope printer? We thought we purchased a printer with a good envelope feeder but it is still jamming frequently and always wrinkles the envelope.

As we get closer to the end of the year with the volume that involves I am dreading the idea of printing our daily acknowledgement envelopes on this printer again.

Do you have a dedicated printer just for envelopes? Do you have a good network printer with envelope capacity that you can recommend?

Melissa

[cseebald]

After years of using an HP LaserJet for printing almost everything, Houghton College recently purchased a Rena envelope printer. I was told the other day that it can be a "little quirky" but they really like it.

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[cseebald]

I forgot to mention that it's a networked high-speed, envelope printer. It used to take them several days to print 5,000 envelopes, but they can now do that in a couple of hours.

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[rluckie]

What is you daily quantities requirements? Also, consider your largest job. We just bought a Pitney Bowes DA550 Envelope printer. They have envelope printers that will run very fast, and we have found them to be reliable. check out www.pb.com

[jas.]

coming in late to this thread: a couple of years ago we bought a bryce/secap 9K-L, which looks exactly like that DA550 there. i wonder if it's the same OEM.

i posted about its advantages and disadvantages over on the blackbaud forums--if you're interested i'll search out the post and paste it over here.

[Justin Pickens]

I've also had trouble with wrinkled or stuck envelopes. We use a Xerox Phaser 8400. We probably don't do enough in house mailing to commit to an envelope printer. Does anyone have any other suggestions for a good basic laser printer that works well with RE?

Thanks,

Justin Pickens
IONA Senior Services

[jsprehn]

We have an HP that always used to wrinkle/eat envelopes, but I have found that if you have a bigger printer, sometimes there's a secondary output tray that doesn't force the envelopes around such a long paper path, that it's much better.

With that said, I'm envious of those of you with envelope printers...

[jas.]

coming back to this way late -- in some ways it's not great; in others it is. To my knowledge there isn't a fully operable, user-friendly dedicated envelope printer out there. Ours runs off this old driver that would be at home on Windows 95, and printing envelopes of custom sizes, or with outputs that are in odd places, or anything, really, can throw it off.

Also, when you set up the job, you have to kind of reconfigure the whole machine, turning knobs and setting tensions and moving feed guides and all, and if you don't do it right it'll jam (and it makes terrible noises when it does). It's obviously made for a mailhouse to set up once, print 100,000 envelopes, and move on to the next job; not so much for us to print out 40 real quickly.

Also the quality isn't up to laser standards. If you could make a laser printer with the rollers and guides and whatnot that were up to handling several hundred or 1000 envelopes per job on a regular basis, you could make a lot of money I bet.

On the bright side, when you print out 3,000 envelopes in under an hour, it rocks.