[sdiy] My PCB positives are see through!

[Maarten Halmans]

A few years back I also had better results with printing or photocopying on 
transparancies. At that time you could feel the toner on the sheets. 
Nowadays new printers and copiers use less toner, my guess it is  because it 
is cheaper and toner cartridge last longer, maybe it's also an environmental 
thing. Some tricks help to get somewhat better results with the new stuff. 
Rotating the image so that the smallest side corresponds with the smallest 
side of the paper helps. In several board designing programs you can select 
the fill style for the polygon planes. Use stripes or crosses instead  of a 
solid fill style.
If you print on plastic sheets it's also possible to "wash" them with black 
ink. Just use a piece of cotton wool and gently rub the ink over the sheet. 
Most ink will stick to the toner and it will fill the tiny holes. Remove the 
redundant ink with clean cottons. I stopped with the plastic sheets because 
they tend to deform a little because of the heat of the fuser. This becomes 
a problem when using double side design especially when on one side there is 
a power plane. Nowadays I use calques with good results.

>I guess it's possible that this isn't a big deal, but I just got my
> prints back on transparancies for etching a few boards and, despite
> having them done at high quality, I can see right through the ground
> plane when I hold it up to any light.  The traces themselves look alot
> better, but I'm still a bit un-nerved about this.  I called the
> printers and they've assured me this is normal for anything that uses
> toner and the only real option for better quality is to use a press
> (big money).  I'd rather not try to stack multiple copies on top of
> one another (even with 3 I can still see through them a bit) as
> aligning them will be a pain.  Comments?
>