Well it finally arrived:

As you know, printers do not print white typically, they work subtractively and simply don’t put toner where white is required. Essentially with this Ghost White Toner, you remove the black toner and install the white. You continue to print whatever you’re printing as ‘black’, the printer thinks its black but really it comes out white. The toners are made by a company called Ghost White Toner in Germany. They claim to offer white remanned toner for several models, however I found in practice they really only had one available for the HP Color LaserJet Pro 200.

I went this route because for my TV Typewriter boards,  I wanted them to look as close to the originals as possible. I could have just printed in black for the silkscreen side, but that didn’t look prototypical to me. I also looked into actual silkscreening, and there is a company that will take your design and make it into a silkscreen. But then ya gotta buy the screen, the paint, deal with the mess.. blah. I just wanted to print it off and transfer. That’s it – not mess around with paint.  I knew, peripherally, that there were printers out there that printed white – used for transfers to tshirts, etc. But they were $3000! I thought about using my toner remanufacturing skills to just buy the white toner powder and refill a black cart with it, but even a bag of the powder was at least $300. Then I found these guys.

So let’s see how it prints to my magazine paper transfer medium:

Looking at it, it looks kinda thin. But that could also be because it’s white and maybe not as opaque as other colors. Let’s fire up the iron and one of my TVT spare boards and see what happens.

I didn’t try very hard – this board is a scrap unit I can’t use because it was etched wrong.. so I didn’t really work it with the iron. But, you get the idea. It’s not bad. But it is thin. I’m reading the instructions and it appears there are some adjustments to print settings you can make to print it darker. I’m going to try some of those next and see how they work out. It may also be partly the magazine paper I’m using.. perhaps I need to use actual transfer paper?

But yeah, a lot easier than actual silkscreening, and in white, no less! The toner itself cost $115USD + shipping – not completely out of line for a toner. Ghost White will sell you a complete kit with appropriate printer for a few hundred bucks. I bought my LaserJet 200 on ebay for $49. Works great, although I had to do some repairs because the shipping monkeys broke it.

Anyway, pretty pleased. Will keep trying different settings and let you know how close I can get.