Oki 9800 White toner conversion to 920wt

[Guest]

Hi all,

we are wanting to get into t-shirt transfers with laser printers that run white toner, currently we do transfers with roland large format machines but its a lot of process to produce transfers, there are a lot of people and companies that are modifying standard oki led printers to print white toner, I spoke to one four printer sales guy and they say you can run white toner in most oki laser printers, we are looking to get a Oki C9800 that looks identical to a oki 920WT printer. The only difference I can see is that on the white toner machines ( 920WT) the toner configuration from the paper input tray is the cyan is first, yellow second, magenta third, then white last, on the c9800 its stand CMYK toners from the paper input size.

We just want know if we can flash the firmware of a 9800 so it becomes a 920WT - mechanically they look identical, Ive been doing a fair amount of research, there are specific t-shirt transfer rips rips that can work with converted printers without flashing anything, because the rip software and ppd files contain the colour channel print data, you basically are just changing the toner order positions in the machine like a CMYW printer and install the printer with either the standard driver on windows, the printer rip software uses a custom PPD that has the colour channels print order which the machine is set to and sends the print data to the printer which prints it the same as a printer with white toner ( which are horrendously expensive for small business owners ).

Can anyone shed light on converting a C9800, because all it seems to be doing over the C920WT series printer is just remapping the order of toner in the machine and recognising that there is a white toner cartridge, would it be as simple as flashing the firmware on the C9800 with a C920WT firmware ?

Thanks in advance

[vickash]

Re: Oki 9800 White toner conversion to 920wt

I've done something similar with a C9600 converted to run W in the K position as an underlay for printing on dark color material. It uses the W drums and toners from the 920WT or a similar model I think? Can't remember exactly. But yes, you're right, they are physically the same machine.

All you need to do to move the drums around is remove 4 black plastic plates inside the main housing, one behind each drum. At the rear of each drum there are a couple pins that interlock with the plastic plates to prevent the wrong color from going into the wrong position. Remove the plates and you can put any drum anywhere.

Other than that, you may need to swap the toner chips around. Pull up the tape that indicates the cartridge color on the top front of each toner, prize up the plastic below that, and there's the chip. Shuffle them around so the printer still see's each color in the right position. You can probably buy some reset chips and keep those on hand too. It won't recognize the chips that come on the 920WT toners. I throw out the original labels and plastic cover and tape them back into place with masking tape.

As for the RIP or flashing firmware, I have no idea. For the handful of jobs this gets used for, the colors are remapped in software beforehand. Trapping of the white underlay is also done by hand lol. Probably a good thing since the registration on those machines is notoriously bad on thicker materials.

Hope that helps. If you do find out if it can be flashed and run with the 920WT driver, do let me know.