Laser printers are fascinating devices that use advanced technology to produce high-quality prints quickly and efficiently.
How does a laser printer work?
- The printers laser beams your print onto a metal drum.
- The drum uses static electricity to attract powdered toner to the drums cylinder.
- The drum rolls the toner onto the paper in the form of your print.
- The toner is melted & pressed onto the paper by heat from a fuser as it passes through its rollers.
- Your print comes out of the printer.
What does a laser printer do?
There are many different types of printer available on the market today, and each uses various technologies to achieve a similar result of the printed page. The laser printer was the first to be invented and was done so in 1969 by Gary Starkweather while working in the Xerox product development team. His idea was to use lasers to imprint an image onto a copier drum which would then be transferred onto paper. Hence, the name ‘Laser printer’.
Step-by-step
- The moment you press print on your computer, tablet or mobile device, the information is sent to the printer memory, where the data is stored temporarily.
- The printer begins to warm up. This is the point where you usually need to wait, and it’s because the corona wire is heating up and getting ready to pass its positive static charge to the drum.
- As the drum (coated metal cylinder) begins to roll, it received a positive charge across its whole surface. Some printers contain four drums, one for each colour – Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black.
- The laser activates, and beams against a series of mirrors to reflect across the surface of the drum(s) imprinting the shape of your print using an opposite negative electrical charge.
- The toner cartridge and hopper sat next to the drum(s) slowly releases positively charged carbon toner particles on to the drum as it turns. The toner is attracted to any areas of negative charge leaving positively charged areas of the drum untouched.
- The transfer belt rolls the paper through the printer giving it a positive charge. As it passes the drum, the negatively charged toner is attracted to the page in the shape of your print.
- The toner is then melted to the paper by hot rollers called the fuser unit, and voila, your page is printed.
Here’s a fantastic video created by Static Control showing the whole process to help explain things a little better: