The Secret Service agent in Kansas City peered hard at a counterfeit $100 bill, ran a finger over it and grimaced in disgust.

It was bad, ugly work.

"Too slick, too," said Charles Green, special agent in charge.

More counterfeiters are using today's ink jet printers, computers and copiers to make money that's just good enough to pass, he said, even though their product is awful.

In the past, he said, the best American counterfeiters were skilled printers who used heavy offset presses to turn out decent 20s, 50s and 100s. Now that kind of work is rare and almost all comes from abroad.

Among American thieves, the 22-year veteran said sadly, "it's a lost art."


But as art fades, greed goes on. Ink-jet counterfeiting is thriving.

Part of the problem, Green said, is that the government has changed the money so much to foil counterfeiting. With all the new bills out there, citizens and even many police don't know what they're supposed to look like.

Moreover, many people see paper money less because they use credit or debit cards.

The result: Ink-jet counterfeiting accounted for 60 percent of $103 million in fake money removed from circulation from October 2007 to August 2008, the Secret Service reports. In 1995, the figure was less than 1 percent.

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Sometimes, life's simplest innovations can turn out to be the most useful: cats' eyes on roads, Post-it Notes, Velcro – the sorts of things that cause a sigh of frustration for not having thought of it yourself.

Embracing blissful simplicity as a creative aide, Dutch communications company Spranq have designed a new environmentally friendly font, that looks like this:

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The Xerox Phaser 8500 and 8550 are excellent printers for business networks. Both of these printers handle high volumes of information quickly, produce color and black and white copies rapidly, and connect easily to most computer networks. But the most important part of a printer is its ink, and the Phaser 8500 ink is uniquely well-designed for consistency and high print quality.

The options available in Phaser printers should be known. Four versions of the 8500/8550 printers are available with different prices and qualities. All of them except 8500/N print two press release how to write of the papers. 8550/DX which is a higher end model offer high resolution and can hold and print large stacks of paper. Printing speed is also good. Lower end printers print around 24 pages per minute while the higher ones can reach up to 30 pages per minute

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TheGreenOffice.com today introduced (SEE THIS)™, a new line of laser printer cartridges made with soy-based toner powder. (SEE THIS)™ represents the first soy-based printing alternative for the workplace. These eco-friendly toner cartridges are comparable to their brand name counterparts in price, print quality, and page yield. Whereas soy-based inks have been available and widely used in commercial printing such as newspapers since the 1970s, soy-based toners for office laser printers and fax machines have not been available until now.

"We are proud to be the first national, online distributor of (SEE THIS)™ toner," says Alex Szabo, CEO of TheGreenOffice.com. "This is the kind of product our industry needs - one that makes greener workplace printing easy, without sacrificing performance or increasing costs. Our goal is for soy-based toners to replace conventional petroleum-based toners as the dominant method of printing in the workplace."

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YOU NO LONGER need to go to work wearing a gas mask as research released this week shows that laser printer toner is not harmful.

Back in 2007 study from Queensland University of Technology in Australia suggested that breathing toner particles from printers could be as harmful to the lungs as cigarette smoke.

However, those researchers alongside some from Fraunhofer Wilhelm Klauditz Institute in Germany have now decided that there is no evidence to support this outrageous claim.

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Printer.com is combining its vast knowledge of printers, cartridges, search engines and e-commerce to introduce the premier printer cost comparison Web site. Launched today, the independent shopping resource features its own database of more than 4,400 printers and 1,600 cartridges. Connecting to more than a dozen leading online retailers, Printer.com aims to provide consumers and businesses with a simple interface to accurately find and compare the total costs associated with owning and operating competing printers.

Printer.com provides fast and easy cost comparisons not only for printers, but also the cartridges that accompany them. This is particularly compelling because it's often easy to neglect the cost of ink cartridges when evaluating different printer options. Utilizing factors such as average pages printed per week, color and size, Printer.com provides different printer options, estimated costs of printer cartridges and links to authorized online merchants. Retailers then compete on price and service to provide consumers with the best deal for the user's needs.

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According to a research report, the fine particulates released by laser printers do not come from the toner. Investigations carried out by the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft's Wilhelm-Klauditz-Institut in collaboration with the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, show the repeatedly detected ultra fine particles consist of volatile organic compounds. Tunga Salthammer, who heads the responsible department at the WKI, noted that "A significant property of these ultra fine particles is their volatility, which suggests that we are not talking about toner particles,".

The suspicion that the fine particles, which were first detected in 2006, are something other than toner particles has been around for a while. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment announced last year that the particles measured in the course of its toner study are "with a probability bordering on certainty" not toner particles. This suspicion was further underlined by tests using modified printers lacking toner and paper, which demonstrated the same effects. This hinted at the conclusion, now reached by the Fraunhofer researchers, that the emissions originate from the printer unit itself.

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Shares of HP (Hewlett-Packard) fell more than 7 percent on Tuesday on concerns about weak sales of printer ink and personal computers, fed in part by pessimistic quarterly earnings from one of the company's distributors. HP, a Dow Jones industrial average .DJI component, was down far more than the index which dropped 0.4 percent. In its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings release on Monday, HP reported a 9 percent increase for printer supplies year-over-year, and an 8 percent drop in printer hardware shipments. HP said its market share would be sustained because slower printer sales have affected the entire industry, and that sales of ink and printer supplies would remain brisk.

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Xerox will scan and image millions of documents for IBM and its customers under a worldwide agreement that was announced.

According to a release, Xerox will serve as the preferred global imaging partner for IBM Managed Business Process Services (MBPS), a unit of IBM Global Technology Services, the company said.

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An international printer cartridge refilling franchise is asking customers to join them in calling on the Canadian government to help in the diversion of an estimated 300 million cartridges from landfills annually around the world.

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