Intec’s professional envelope feeders use a floating delivery table, which fires the envelopes into your printer.

The new envelope printing system incorporating feeder and shingling conveyor.

Fulfilling personalised print jobs is rapidly becoming the mainstay for making a print business profitable, and envelopes are no exception. Unlike printing standard ‘office letterheads’, printing envelopes reliably, consistently and cost effectively is surprisingly difficult, so many users out-source them to their print supplier. As such, envelope printing is seen by print vendors as a way to maximise revenue and profits from their customers.

There are a number of reasons why many companies do not print their envelopes in-house. However, problems caused by the additional thickness of envelopes compared to regular paper are the most common. The envelope’s flaps also have a tendency to catch, particularly window envelopes, which often catch on the flap of the next envelope causing multiple miss feeds. These potential problems can make the whole job of printing envelopes a real pain for anyone with a normal printer or copier.

Even when you do find a printer or copier that prints envelopes, feeding them can be very labour intensive. The air in the envelope itself means that although a normal printer’s multipurpose tray may hold 200 sheets of paper, it normally only holds 20 to 30 envelopes. Also the compressible nature of the stack of envelopes means the pick-up roller pushes the stack down rather than pulling envelopes forwards, causing feed errors.

Intec Printing Solutions’ range of envelope feeders, in which the latest launch is the EPP550, are specific to the envelope industry and are similar to those found on high speed litho envelope printing presses. From the CEF (Compact Envelope Feeder) to the Heavy Duty Production Feeder, all of the Intec options are built to the highest quality standards, and all have ease of use and print quality in mind. With the launch of the EPP550 the company believes that it has maintained its position as a leading supplier of cutting edge envelope printing systems.

Unlike most mainstream copiers and other basic laser printers which use an ‘S WRAP’ type of paper path, Intec Envelope Printers use a straight through paper path, making envelope flaps easier to handle and substantially reducing common feed errors. The printer is also custom manufactured to handle heavier stocks and card as well as envelopes, enabling even the heaviest envelopes to feed and image perfectly.

An envelope feeder also solves the challenges created by the compressible nature of envelopes, because rather than the printer trying to pull them off the top of a stack, where they are bouncing up and down due to the air in them, the envelopes are stacked in a hopper which is capable of accepting between 50 and 2000 envelopes at a time, depending upon the model, and each envelope is then ‘pulled’ from the bottom of the stack, using the weight of the envelopes above to push out the air, thus ensuring feeding is much more consistent and reliable.

Another key advantage of feeding envelopes from the bottom of a stack is that you can continuously load onto the top of the stack to provide uninterrupted printing. This is something that is simply not possible with a normal paper tray or multi-purpose feeder in standard printers, and is crucial for anyone looking to print more than a few hundred envelopes at a time.

Intec’s professional range of envelope feeders also delivers a number of other advantages, in particular when handling window envelopes. The buckle separator pads prevent the flap on the preceding envelope from ‘snagging’ on the window of the next envelope, ensuring consistent and reliable print. 

Finally, the envelope feeder can be partnered with one of Intec’s shingling conveyors. The conveyors are used to spread the envelopes out during print production, enabling the user to quality control check them before they ‘gather’ at the end of the conveyor, ready to be re-packed.