what are magnetic cartridges?
I've only seen these for laser printers (i.e. toner cartridges), but maybe they are also available for ink jets. In any case, what they are is toner that has small bits of magnetic material mixed in with the toner. What this is for is printing the numbers that you see on the bottom of checks. These numbers (called MICR) are read by the bank clearing houses' automated systems so they know how/where to route the checks. Typically, when you buy checks, either regular checks to write on or computer checks, those numbers come pre-printed (with magnetic ink). The only time you'd want to use magnetic toner (that I'm aware of) is if you wanted to print these numbers yourself, and the only time you'd want to do that is if you had multiple checking accounts but only wanted to have one kind of pre-printed check stock. That way, you could print the MICR for each account separately, rather than have to change check stock for each check run. As you can imagine, this is typically only needed by large companies or companies that have some specific reason to print checks for multiple accounts. (If anyone's aware of any other use or purpose for magnetic toner and/or MICR in general, please enlighten me). Cheers! Dan
