What Is Printing Toner?

Toner is a powder mixture used in laser printers and photocopiers to produce printed text and images on paper, generally through a toner cartridge. Mostly granulated plastic, early mixtures only added carbon powder and iron oxide, however, mixtures containing polypropylene, smoked silica and various minerals for tribo-electrification have since been developed. Toners using plant-derived plastic also exist as an alternative to petroleum plastic. Toner particles are melted by the heat of the fuser and are therefore bonded to the paper.

In earlier photocopiers, this low-cost carbon toner was poured from a bottle to a reservoir in the machine[citation needed]. Later copies, and laser printers from the first 1984 Hewlett-Packard LaserJet, feed directly from the sealed toner cartridge. Laser toner cartridges for use in color copyers and printers come in cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) sets, allowing a very large gamut of color to be generated by mixing.

It is one of the key elements of our work to achieve a remarkable quality at the time of printing, but few know exactly what this mechanism is. We refer to a toner whose function and mechanisms we will attempt to analyze and transmit in the following lines.

When we talk about a toner, we refer to the dust that, electrically charged, consists of two types of elements, pigments on the one hand and plastics on the other. In the first case, those are the elements that give color to the text that we are going to print. The plastic function is precisely to be mixed with these pigments, which are then melted through the toner melting unit.

Meaning of the word toner: this word has several meanings, but we only use it as a mixture of powder to make images using laser xerography technology.

How do toner cartridges work?

How is this process going to work? It’s a very simple way. It begins when the transfer roller receives a negative charge and a uniform negative charge is transferred to the image cylinder. The cleaning blade comes into operation from there, which mechanically traps the elements that fall into the waste hopper.

Then comes the laser unit, which hits the surface of the image cylinder and generates an electrostatic image. This is possible after the laser beam hits the surface of the drum and causes the drum to lose its load.

This step results in the developing part in which the roller releases a layer of negatively charged toner, transferring to the surface of the cylinder only those parts that are illuminated by the laser light beam.

This process results in the last step in which the printer selects a sheet and passes through the image cylinder and the transfer roller. This function presupposes a consequence, which is not the other one, that the toner is attracted to it by the difference of loads that generates the impression on the paper.

At this point, it should be noted that the toner is firmly attached to the paper after using heat to melt it, avoiding parallel spills of material. This is the key to the process , which allows a very high print quality to be achieved.

What to take into account when buying a toner?

There are many experts who believe that the use of a printer toner is cheaper for users who print a large number of documents. Within a minority stream, this element is also chosen depending on the model of the printer used and the performance of the available ink cartridges.

But how can we choose the toner that best suits us? The printers used by the toner cartridges are laser printers.

In this sense, there are some criteria that allow us to compare the different types of toners that exist on the market, so knowing them will be of great help before you make your purchase.

For this reason , it is essential to know, in the first place, the type of toner used by your printer, whether it is powder, liquid or laser. To make the task easier, we recommend that you compare only those toners of the class used by your equipment.

Next, know and identify what kind of performance your ink cartridges have, what we commonly call life cartridges. It consists of a number that is usually printed on the toner box. However, it can also be found on the manufacturer’s website. With this indicator in your possession, you can see the number of pages that can be printed from a toner cartridge. So all you’ve got to do is buy that identifier for those toners you ‘re thinking about buying.

In order to facilitate this process, you must divide the number of pages you calculate the performance of the cartridge between the price of the printer toner, the operation from which we will obtain the cost of each page. Again, you ‘re going to have to compare the result of all the toner that’s in your mind to buy, a comparison that’s going to help you check what the true price of the toner is.

This is because, in practice, a toner can have an average cost of more than EUR 15 higher than the other model. However, by making this comparison on the basis of the cost per page, we will find that, in the long term, the one with the highest price can yield more.

It is also important, finally, to know and compare the useful life of the toner. And in some cases it may last less than a year and a half, so it would not be a convenient choice for those users who make impressions in a timely manner. We must therefore take into account the number of impressions that are going to be made, in addition to their rhythm and duration, before selecting the toner that we are going to buy.