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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

Use a monochrome laser printer for your ransom notes.

In all honesty for years I had one in my small home office, and every time I printed something I could smell it in the room afterwards for an hour, sometimes even getting headaches from this. Switched to inkjet a few years ago and will never look back.

What was the printer?

I haven't experienced the odor of ozone when printing at home since my HP Laserjet 4 died from water damage 18 years ago.

My current Brother laser printer (an MFC-2750DW, IIRC) is so non-stinky that I haven't thought about for a very long time.

Samsung ML-1630. I had it for a really long time. I had opened it up to solder the page counter to ground so it always thought it was on page 0, instead of demanding to replacement. And I had manually refilled the toner many times into the toner cart. But I don’t think the smell is because of that, it’s the same laser printer / photocopier smell you smell in all print shops. I believe it is small aerosolized toner particles, makes me wonder if long term print shop workers have a higher cancer rate.

Possibly ozone, generated by the corona wire - the printer will have a filter which is only good for some (large) number of duty cycles.

Very few domestic / small office printers will ever hit that number, but for a ~20 year old model, it's possible yours has. The service manual suggests it's rated for 50,000 pages (as are the drum and roller), but unfortunately isn't replaceable.

Time for a new model?

(The canonical print shop smell is ozone - imagesetters produced way more than a laser printer - together with solvent from the inks and lots and lots of stale coffee. Possibly mixed with cigarette smoke, depending on just how long ago you're talking about...)

Ramson notes must be coloured so that it is clear it isn't a scam.

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