When you print something, your computer sends a vast stream of electronic data (typically a few megabytes or million characters) to your laser printer. An electronic circuit in the printer figures out what all this data means and what it needs to look like on the page. It makes a laser beam scan back and forth across a drum inside the printer, building up a pattern of static electricity. The static electricity attracts onto the page a kind of powdered ink called toner. Finally, as in a photocopier, a fuser unit bonds the toner to the paper.
- Millions
of bytes (characters) of data stream into the printer from your computer.
- An electronic circuit in the printer
(effectively, a small computer in its own right) figures out how to print this
data so it looks correct on the page.
- The
electronic circuit activates the corona wire. This is a high‐voltage wire that
gives a static electric charge to anything nearby.
- The
corona wire charges up the photoreceptor drum, so the drum gains a positive
charge spread uniformly across its surface.
- At
the same time, the circuit activates the laser to make it draw the image of the
page onto the drum. The laser beam doesn't actually move it bounces off a
moving mirror that scans it over the drum. Where the laser beam hits the drum,
it erases the positive charge that was there and creates an area of negative charge
instead. Gradually, an image of the entire page builds up on the drum: where
the page should be white, there are areas with a positive charge; where the
page should be black, there are areas of negative charge.
- An
ink roller touching the photoreceptor drum coats it with tiny particles of
powdered ink (toner). The toner has been given a positive electrical charge, so
it sticks to the parts of the photoreceptor drum that have a negative charge
(remember that opposite electrical charges attract in the same way that
opposite poles of a magnet attract). No ink is attracted to the parts of the
drum that have a positive charge. An inked image of the page builds up on the
drum.
- A
sheet of paper from a hopper on the other side of the printer feeds up toward
the drum. As it moves along, the paper is given a strong positive electrical
charge by another corona wire.
- When
the paper moves near the drum, its positive charge attracts the negatively
charged toner particles away from the drum. The image is transferred from the
drum onto the paper but, for the moment, the toner particles are just resting
lightly on the paper's surface.
- The
inked paper passes through two hot rollers (the fuser unit). The heat and
pressure from the rollers fuse the toner particles permanently into the fibers
of the paper.
- The
printout emerges from the side of the copier. Thanks to the fuser unit, the
paper is still warm. It's literally hot off the press
