Printing tickets at home.

August 31, 2008 4:59 AM

Can I make tickets with my HP L7680 printer?

I am designing tickets for a dinner, capacity 200 people. I have an amazing HP L7680 (affectionately known as the Propaganda-O-Matic 3000), up to which my husband intelligently hooked a Continuous Ink System. So ink is not a problem.

What I'd like to do is print them on the heaviest card stock possible. Can my printer do this? It will be 20 sheets max, maybe a few more to take Murphy into account.. Some stuff of the consistency of poster board but thinner would be great. Stuff that will make the tickets look really nice would be good too, but it doesn't need to be shiny or anything.

Note: If the printer can't handle paper of any thickness, is there another type of paper I can get that will make the tickets look... I don't know.. professional? Ticket-y? Would photo paper be the way?

The ticket design will be colour.. lots of yellow in background, black text, maybe a few other colours.

Stuff I can get quickly in Glasgow would be good.

I intend to guillotine the tickets once done.

posted by By The Grace of God to technology (4 comments total)

The specs for your printer are here.

If you scroll down to "Documents and Media Handling" it lists the min/max copy weights.

Hope that's helpful.
posted by NoraCharles at 5:16 AM on August 31, 2008

# Min Copy Weight 60 g/m2
# Max Copy Weight 200 g/m2

That's about 16 pound paper all the way up to 53 pound paper. Those aren't hard and fast rules either, other issues are the flimsyness (forget the name of that) of the paper, and more importantly, the Sheffield (smoothness) of the paper. Stiffer, slipperier paper won't work as well even if it meets the weight.

Advice: make sure you print on the front of the paper. Paper does have a front or back side and it makes a difference in the end result curl of the paper. The issue manifests differently in an inkjet, mostly because of the 180 degree paper path versus the heating element in a laser printer. In that printer, the front of the page goes down in paper tray.

Also, run a few pieces of test stock through to make sure there are no image defects- a paper with different weight than the usual paper put through can tend to pick up stray ink that the usual paper won't touch.
posted by gjc at 8:05 AM on August 31, 2008

Just something to watch out for -- when I run thick paper through my HP Color Laserjet the pickup rollers leave noticeable marks on the paper.
posted by SirStan at 9:26 AM on August 31, 2008

Generally, printers that allow heavy stock papers have an alternative paper path that allows the paper to pass by the print heads without being bent. But there are standard photo papers for inkjet printers that would make acceptable ticket stock and should work fine in your printer (and they will print nicely too). Epson makes a matte paper that would work very well.
posted by doctor_negative at 10:02 AM on August 31, 2008