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Friday, June 22, 2012

5 Ideas That Will Make You Think About Ink

By Brian Elek


Current business practice requires that all tech savvy and easy to work with companies use fax, scan, and print machines. Companies must not only be able to easily accept the information which their customers send, they must also be able to keep quick and clean records of what happens in their business. There are various kinds of printers from inkjets to laser printers. It is common that laser printers are chosen for their fast material output.

Laser printers use photoconductivity and electrostatic attraction to create their final printed products. To begin the imprinting process, a laser projects part of the image of the material to be printed onto a mechanical piece, called a drum, that has been coated with chemical or organic semiconductors. The photoconductivity effect allows the atomic charge to leak away from areas that are exposed to the laser's light. The areas that are still charged are then left to pick up tiny physical material from the collection of dry ink called 'toner' that is also located in the printer.

The ink in toners is not liquid or even dried out common ink but a powdered combination of materials. At first toners were full of basic powdered carbon. Carbon powders began to be mixed with plastic compounds called polymers to make the printed material more pleasing. Polymer, that is, plastics, waxes, resins of various sorts, and carbon might all be found in different selections of today's printer toner cartridges.

Modern innovations move towards smaller and smaller materials as they look better as a final printed material. Modern cartridge produces are even trying to 'grow' new and smaller materials to fill their toners with.

These materials stick to the areas that have not had the laser shined on them through a naturally occurring charge within the particles. For the powdered 'ink' to stick to the desired piece of paper, heat is applied within the printer.

When laser printers were first used in the 1980's people had to refill their toner ink cartridges manually through a messy and time consuming process. Today people prefer to put a whole new toner ink cartridge into their printer rather than to manually refill the powdered ink within the old container. It is not healthy for the Earth's environment to keep depositing the plastic contained in both the printer's ink and the actual plastic containers onto it. Certain companies actually have the drum replaced along with each refill of the ink container. It is lucky that society is moving away from such practices. Modern producers now work to make toner ink and cartridges more sustainable and less draining on the environment's future health.




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