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Laser Printer Toner

Laser printer toner is not 'liquid' ink

but a dry, powdery substance that is electrically charged to adhere to printer paper. Then, then the image is fused to the paper with infrared heat from a part of the printer called the fuser. Laser printer toner is one of the most durable and clear on the market.

The Process of Laser Printing

Static Electricity
Laser printers use static electricity as a temporarily 'glue' by inducing a charge that attracts oppositely charged particles.

The Drum
The rotating drum is initially given a positive charge by the corona wire. As the drum rotates, a tiny laser beam moves across the surface of the drum which discharges the positive charge to draw an image of what is to be printed.

After the laser draws the pattern, the printer coats the drum with positively charged laser printer toner which clings to the areas of the drum that the laser induced a negative charge. Then the drum rolls over a sheet of paper that has been oppositely charged to attract the laser printer toner and hold it in place.

The Fuser
Then the paper is passed through a pair of heated rollers called the Fuser which melts the laser printer toner and fuses it to the fiber in the paper. To ensure uniform distribution of heat, fusers typically have an infrared lamp inside to heat the paper very quickly. However, there is little risk of fire because all of this happens in the blink of an eye. This is also why prints from laser printer toner come out a little hot to the touch.

The Laser Printer Toner Assembly
Since this is the apparatus that actually draws the image, the laser scanning assembly is exquisitely precise in rendering the signal that has been sent to print. The assembly consists of a laser, a movable mirror, and a lens.

The laser receives the image to be printed as a series

of tiny dots and then passes that image onto a movable mirror which then focuses the light through a series of lenses as it moves across the drum in horizontal lines emitting a pulse of light for every dot to be printed and emitting no light on areas that are to be left blank.

Laser Printer Toner
Laser printer toner isn't really ink at all. It is a powdery mixture of pigment and plastic particles. Plastic is used in laser printer toner so that when the paper passes through the fuser, the heat melts the plastic to the paper fiber for images that are much less likely to smear or smudge.

7/4/2008 4:59:07 PM