What Is Toner?
Toner is a powder used in laser printers, faxes and photocopiers to form the printed text and images on the paper. In its early form, it was simply carbon powder. Then, to improve the quality of the printout, the carbon was melt-mixed with a polymer and the particles are melted by the heat of the fuser and bind to the paper.
In earlier machines, this low-cost carbon toner was poured by the user from a bottle into a reservoir in the machine. Current machines feed directly from a sealed laser toner cartridge. Modern laser toner cartridges intended for use in colour copiers and printers come in cyan, magenta, yellow and black.
The specific polymer used varies by manufacturer but can be a butadiene copolymer, or a few other special polymers. Toner formulations vary from manufacturer to manufacturer and even from machine to machine. Typically formulation, granule size and melting point vary the most.
Originally, the particle size of toner averaged 14–16 micrometres or greater. To improve image resolution, particle size was reduced, eventually reaching about 8–10 micrometers for 600 dots per inch resolution. Further reductions in particle size producing further improvements in resolution are being developed through the application of new technologies such as Emulsion-Aggregation. Toner manufacturers maintain a quality control standard for particle size distribution to produce a powder suitable for use in their printers.
Toner has traditionally been made by compounding the ingredients and creating a slab which was broken or pelletized, then turned into a fine powder with a controlled particle size range by air milling. This process results in toner granules with varying sizes and aspherical shapes. To get a finer print, some companies are using a chemical process to grow toner particles from molecular reagents. This results in more uniform size and shapes of toner particles. The smaller, uniform shapes permit more accurate colour reproduction and more efficient toner use.
This makes it imperative that you match the correct toner with your printer, to obtain best results and maintain printer life.
Exploring Printer Ink Colour Combinations
While printer ink may be just a line item on your budget, the way these inks work together can help you understand what you are loading into your printer every month. With a few tweaks and additions, you could save on ink cartridges and waste less toner.
Printers typically utilize variations on the three primary colours. These colours are typically Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), and Yellow (yellow). By understanding how these three work together, you can make more informed printing decisions.
Black: Black is made by combining all other colours until no one single colour can be reflected back to the eye. By combining all three primary colours in equal amounts, printers can create a colour similar to black. But because this is a crude combination, prints can often come out brown or grey. That is why, when your black printer cartridge is low, your prints come out grey. Printer cartridges come in black as well and most offices utilize black ink for their prints to create more brilliant blacks. Some offices, however, don’t need many documents to go out of the office and therefore choose to simply allow the typical CMY group to get the job done. This is not typically recommended, as black ink creates a more preferable, legible print. Black is abbreviated as K, which stands for Kohle, the German word for coal. This is so the colour spectrum RGB (Red, Green, Blue) will not be confused with the normal printer spectrum of CMYK.
Cyan: As a blue with some green in it, Cyan is used largely as a subtractive colour, removing brightness from colours, rather than adding it. It is critical to creating shadow and expressing the darker end of the colour palette. Cyan can come as its own cartridge or in a combined CMY ink cartridge.
Magenta: Unlike Cyan, Magenta contains no green at all but does contain a bit of blue. It is a subtractive colour also but helps push prints towards the middle of the colour scale. This colour can also come on its own or in a combined cartridge with Cyan and Yellow.
Yellow: Perhaps the most complex colour in the primary scale, Yellow is a blueless colour that absorbes all wavelengths of blue from light. It can mix with blue to create green at the darker end of the spectrum, but can also be combined in light or heavy doses to create a wide range of colours on the brighter end of the spectrum. This colour can appear in printers on its own or combined with Cyan and Magenta.