Issues With Inkjet Printed Pages

Recently I bought an album with nicely home designed and printed pages with stamps in mounts. The pages had been inserted into plastic sleeves and housed in a three ring binder. I detected a slight odour and so took them out of the sleeves to breath and it has worked quite well. It wasn't smoke odour but a metallic one, and I'm thinking it might have been the ink from an ink jet printer. Has anyone else come across this? Is inserting self-made pages (with hinged or mounted stamps) in plastic sleeves a bad idea? Would using a laser printer have prevented the problem I encountered? Sorry for the long post.

More than likely, it's the plastic that's the source of the odor. If they were high-quality plastic sleeves made from archival material that doesn't melt ink or otherwise interact with what's inside them, they should be fine. But how would you know that? Most likely, you can't. If they're oily feeling or have a "rainbow" effect in the light (that's probably oil), I'd get rid of them fast.

I suppose you could buy some better sleeves, ones you know are safe, and transfer the pages? I have no idea what they would be, though. Or just throw away the plastic and put the pages alone into the binder. I've never been a big fan of plastic sleeves to hold album pages. I prefer the bare paper since that allows airflow, letting the stamps "breathe" better.

If it is the ink or the paper the stamps are mounted on, you'll only find out if you remove the pages from the plastic sleeves,

My money is on the plastic sleeves as the cause of the odor, since plastic does that sort of thing. Paper has been used for generations and it's generally safe. Plastic sleeves are fairly recent ideas for stamps, so I'm much less trusting of them. I've bought a few albums from previous owners with hundreds of pages inside plastic sleeves to acquire lots of common stamps cheaply. The first thing I did was to remove the paper album pages from the sleeves and throw all the plastic away. I've noticed that some of the worst plastic gets oily over time which can't be good for stamps.

Whom knows?
I use plastic sleeves on all my 100+ albums.
20 years, no noticeable problems.

I notice when I turn the pages, the plastic sleeves "breath"
I like that.
No contact with icky fingers, dust etc.


But....Inkjet... my opinion .."Eeek!"
That's like mounting your stamps on fugitive ink.

I have used inkjet printers for my airmail collection for 28 years. Never given much thought to the quality of the ink. And I have never had a problem with it. Just don't get it wet -- it smears.

My paper is archival quality. I don't know if that matters. Seemed like a good idea when I bought it.

I have never used plastic sleeves. My first pages were printed in 1994 and show no wear. I see no benefit to plastic sleeves. The stamps are in plastic mounts. They don't need further protection, IMO.

Ten or 15 years ago, a former Xerox engineer posted the following on a forum. I don't think it was Stamp Community Family. I know nothing about laser printers, so maybe this is no longer an issue. According to the engineer:

"You should be very careful using Xerographic album pages. Photocopies use an oil to keep the toner from adhering to the fuser rolls that melt the toner into the paper. This oil is absorbed by the paper and can attack your stamps, particularly over long times and pressures.

"The toner on the paper can also cause pages to stick together, particularly if you store your albums horizontally and put any significant weight on top.

"The toner coming off the pages can also be an indication of a humidity problem. When paper gets wet, it expands but the toner, being plastic, doesn't. Too much humidity and the toner will pop off the paper. These machines are designed for the office environment and don't work as well at home.

"Finally, the card stock does not work well with the Xerographic process. The stiff paper tends to be smoothly finished and does not hold onto the toner too well. It also absorbs a lot of heat from the fuser rolls, allowing them to run cooler than desired in long runs of any more than a few sheets. This degrades the toner fix to the paper. (For thick papers, a slower machine works better because the fix performance is related to the dwell time in the fuser. The slower the process speed, the more time the toner has to melt and stick to the paper.)

"Having worked as an engineer at Xerox for over 30 years and dealing with these issues, I would never use Xerography to create album pages. Stick with inkjet, relatively cheap 20# paper, and a good mount to protect your stamps."

Given this guy's qualifications, I would stick with inkjets.

Ed Foster

And so you should,
go with what you feel is best for you.

A couple of points...

A personal observation is not the singular of data. What might be working for one person does NOT mean that it will work for someone else with different environmental conditions. And given that environmental conditions are paramount in any discussion about how paper ages, we need to be careful about making any assumptions like 'I read that this works for a guy on the forum'.

No library, archive, or museum I know of uses sheet protectors. Since they enclosure the sheet of paper they can be both a blessing and a curse. If the surrounding environmental conditions only get bad once every few months and only for a short period of time, then a sheet protector's micro-climate would probably help. But if the surrounding environmental conditions got bad more frequently or for longer periods of time, the sheet protectors' micro-climate would not protect and would in fact retain the page in poor conditions longer.

Controlling the environmental conditions is key in any paper storage discussion. And while WE might be aware of this a bigger question is what happens when we are no longer around. Will a family member box your collection up and put it on a cement floor in the garage or basement? Do they know to limit wide temperature and humidity swings?
Don