The Internet is the one-stop shop where you can find anything and everything that you need, including stylish custom-designed checks for your personal use. In order to print this, you would need to print this out with a special kind of toner offered by companies like MICR.

What is the difference between MICR toners from standard toners?

Apart from being able to provide high quality images and text documents, MICR toners would allow you to print out custom-designed checks that would be accepted by most banks. This is because MICR toner cartridges are developed with magnetic toners. This is extremely important for check printing. Banks would often check the authenticity of a check through the use of a machine that checks the magnetic pattern embedded on the check. If the bank’s machine does not recognize this would have to be manually encoded and cause you to pay a fee for the check processing.

What printers can use MICR toners?

Because of the bank requirement for magnetic ink detection, MICR toners can only be used in laser printers. As of the moment, MICR toner cartridges are compatible with Hewlett-Packard and Lexmark laser printers only.

Font and MICR toners

To print out checks, you would need a special font that is used to print out the E-13B check information on the MICR line of the check. Most check printing software programs already come with the required font in the program. However, for this to be printed and for security reasons, you would need to purchase a font cartridge which would need to be installed into the printer for you to print checks. Your laser printer must also be equipped with SIMM or DIMM as well.

Check Printing Tips

Here are a few tips to help you print out your custom-designed checks without the worry of bank fees:

• Store an extra MICR toner cartridge always. When the printer signals that the toner level of your MICR cartridge is already low, this has to be replaced with a fresh one. This is to make sure that the checks that you print out have enough magnetic material for bank machines to recognize them.
• Regularly clean your printer. Dust and toner particles eventually accumulate inside the printer which would minimize the printout quality of your checks.
• Always print in Normal or Best mode. Using the economy or draft mode of the printer would result the print out to be light. This would make the MICR printout to be unreadable by the bank’s check recognition machine.
• Inspect the clear band. Make sure that the only thing that is printed out on the MICR clear band section of the custom-check are the E-13B MICR characters. The presence of any text or image in this area would cause the characters to be unreadable by check sorting machines used by the bank.
• Do a Trial Run. Before printing out the amount of checks that you would be using, print out a few copies to make sure that the E-13B characters and other information on the check are correct and legible.

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