As inkjet continues to gain popularity, in-plants are increasingly switching from toner to inkjet envelope printers for their speed and efficiency advantages — but toner devices still earn their keep when it comes to quality.
Inkjet has been on a meteoric rise, and in-plants are increasingly turning to this technology for their envelope printing needs.
According to In-plant Impressions’ “In-plant Equipment Investment Trends (2025),” the fourth most-purchased devices over the past two years were inkjet envelope presses. In fact, there were half as many survey respondents reporting adding toner envelope presses as there were respondents who added their inkjet counterparts.
That begs the question: Is it time to let toner envelope printers go the way of the dodo and make room for inkjet? We spoke with in-plant managers across the country who have run both inkjet and toner envelope printers to learn about the pros and cons of each.
Diving Into Inkjet Envelope Printing
The journey to California State University, Sacramento’s current envelope printing setup has not been a direct one. University Print & Mail was printing inkjet envelopes on a Quadient Memjet until it died in October 2023. It was replaced by an iJetColor 1175 — another inkjet device.
Laura Lockett, former director of the in-plant — which is a PRINTING United Alliance member — says the iJetColor has been able to keep up with customer demands.
“Our campus branding for envelopes has the Sac State ‘S’ as a gradient. It starts at a 10% tint and fades to zero,” says Lockett, who retired July 31. "And what was happening is when we tested [toner devices] with that gradient, it would band and it would get to … the middle of the ‘S’ and it would just stop. It just didn't have a smooth transition, and our campus brand people would have been upset if we went to a device that did that.”
In Columbia, Missouri, Kelli Embry, supervisor of Document Services, Print & Graphics at Shelter Insurance Companies, says her shop prints 300,000 envelopes a year. They switched from a Xante Impressia to an iJetColor 1175C in September 2024. The Xante had reached the end of its life by then, but that wasn’t the only reason Embry moved the operation to inkjet.
“The efficiency really benefits us so that if the operator gets caught up, he can go over and run a different machine,” she says. “It's nice that we have that availability for him to be able to move around and do more than one machine at a time.”
Aside from efficiency, Embry says using inkjet for envelopes has eliminated jamming issues and enabled printing on larger envelopes. Plus, she’s hoping to bring some outsourced jobs back in-house now that the shop is using inkjet.
EMC Insurance Print & Graphic Resources has also made the inkjet switch and now uses an iJetColor NXT and a Riso ComColor GL7430 for envelopes in its Des Moines, Iowa, shop. Like Embry, Assistant Manager Nate Riggins says his in-plant’s feeding issues have all but gone away.
“Most of the time when we have feeding issues on the inkjets, it's because the envelopes come in curled,” Riggins says. “They just don't take care with putting them in the box flat, so they have a little bit of a curl to them. We have to fan them out and make sure they get flattened, and once we do that, they feed fine.”
In Upstate New York, one of the advantages Tom Licata, supervisor of Rochester City School District’s Print Shop, sees in inkjet is its ability to print on standard window envelopes. Because these envelopes would be melted by toner devices’ fuser rolls, in-plants using toner would have to invest in more costly digital window envelopes, he notes.
On the whole, in-plants are seeing great benefits with inkjet.
“Inkjet will get you more speed. It will print to the edge,” Riggins says. “It's going to have more uptime to it, and the operators won't have to battle the printer as much as a toner envelope printer. Those are huge advantages on why you should go with inkjet.”
Inkjet will get you more speed. It will print to the edge. It's going to have more uptime to it, and the operators won't have to battle the printer as much as a toner envelope printer.
—Nate Riggins
Sticking With Toner
But Sac State doesn’t just use inkjet for envelopes; the shop bought a Konica Minolta C6100 with an extra fuser in 2018 to do color work, and Lockett says it was a “happy byproduct” that it can print envelopes as well. The in-plant started using the C6100 for envelopes because the shop’s previous Memjet inkjet envelope printer couldn’t run 10x13” envelopes, she says. Plus, the ink smeared on Tyvek.
Rochester City School District also has a diverse range of envelope printing devices, including a two-color Hamada offset press (which Licata says is being phased out), two toner printers (a Konica Minolta C2070 and an IntoPrint SP1360), and a Quadient Mach 6 inkjet press.
“The Mach 6 is a great envelope printer,” Licata praises. “You just pretty much set it and it goes. The downside to that is the quality is not as good as the toner-based [printers]. So, if we have a higher-quality envelope that we want to do, we try to run it on the toner-based [printers].”
Adding to the quality concerns, Embry admits that color matching is more accurate on toner equipment like her shop’s previous Xante Impressia than it is on inkjet.
“The color matching is not perfect; it gets close,” she says of inkjet. “You do have the ability to go in and pinpoint a spot color, and do a range of that color, and pick which one you want. … We have a customer that has a logo that's hard for us to match on the inkjet, but we get close and they're good with that.”
Embry also notes that inkjet and toner look a little different when they’re laid down on paper, with toner being more crisp and “shinier.”
The color matching is not perfect; it gets close. We have a customer that has a logo that's hard for us to match on the inkjet."
—Kelli Embry
How to Choose
While many in-plants are turning to inkjet for efficiency gains in their envelope production, some still rely on the high-quality prints toner is known for.
“If somebody was looking to get to doing envelopes, all three of the products work well,” Licata says of his one inkjet and two toner presses. “You just have to know what your end users want: Do they want quality, or do they just want down-and-dirty envelopes with a lower quality?”
If you’re evaluating the value inkjet envelope presses may hold for your in-plant — whether you want to replace old toner machines or supplement their capabilities — having your potential vendor run samples for you is critical.
“When you're evaluating them, it's really important for you to take test files for the types of envelopes that you will print and have them print them in front of you,” Lockett says. “A lot of places will say, ‘Oh, send us your files, we'll have them printed and we'll have them ready for you at the demo.’ It's always been really important to us that we don't let them do that, that we actually watch them run, because we want to see what it takes for you to actually dial in that color or get it set up. How laborious is that process, because is that something that we want to sign on to?”
