What Printer Toner Is About

Written by: Stan Retner
Total views: 0 | Word Count: 639 | Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2010 | 0 comments

If you think of printer as a body, a cartridge will be heart of that body. It runs through the printer a vital substance - toner. As well as blood, toner enables printers to perform their functions - create images and texts.

In a wider sense, toner is not only blood for printers, it plays an important role in the life of human beings. You can't imagine a business office without a printer, or copier of fax in it. And, despite the ongoing development of electronic documentation, the number of hard copies, whether it's text document, graphics or color images, is growing every year.

So did you ever happen to wonder what this powder, which a professional life is virtually impossible without, is and how it is made?

Simply put, toner is a mix of resins, plastic, waxes and some other additional chemical reagents merged together and then smashed into tiny little bits, into dust. Originally and up to date, the toner was made using a melt mixing or hot compounding process. The named ingredients are blended while molten to produce a homogenous paste. Afterwards, the paste is cooled, and there are few ways of cooling it. The mix is either slabbed out by extruding it onto a cooling belt, or it is pelletized and then the pellets are cooled.

In the next stage, the toner bulks are to be ground to powder usually by air-swept hammer mills or jet mills. The result of this grinding is toner particles of different sizes. The particles that are too big or too small are then sifted out several times. The sorted out particles are mixed with additives to enhance the properties of the toner. This is a traditional way of producing pulverized toner, and the resulting toner particle size averages about 8 micron. Have no idea how big or small that is? If you take a look at a hair, 8 microns would be 1/3 of its width.

The size of particles is related to the printing resolution. 8 micron particles make 600 dots per inch, while 12 microns particles only provide 300 dots on inch.

So, grinding makes the traditional method of toner manufacturing. What is the new one?

The production approach that came to shift the grinding came from the field of chemistry. This way of making toner involves growing the particles out of molecules in an emulsion made from all the ingredients dissolved or suspended in a liquid.

The chemical toner manufacturing initially started in the 1990s and recently has begun to become more and more widespread. However, the chemical toner is still less common compared to its traditional counterpart.

The chemical way of manufacture is cheaper, and since there's tighter control over process of manufacture, particles have much more even shape and size, unlike those of the standard toner.

The round, smooth surface of particles help them flow better in the powder state. Moreover, such particles hold a more uniform electrostatic charge in the laser printer, which significantly affect the printing quality.

The new method of toner production is more advantageous: size of particles can be lowered to 4 micron which is twice as little as smallest particles which can be made using regular grinding.

Worth mentioning is the fact that the smaller toner particles size provides a higher page yield. It is estimated that, compared to 8 micron particles, about 40% less 4 micron toner is needed to produce the same print.

It takes 40% of less energy to manufacture chemical toner, and carbon footprint is a lot smaller, too. Chemical toner is also power-saving when used in printer, as the fuser heats and fixes toner at lower temperature. This quickens the whole printing process and especially the first page out time.

About the Author

Tired of searching the web for a site to sell you your toner? You search is over at TonerCartridgeDepot.com.

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