Laser printing is an electrostatic digital printing process. Laser printers transmit their print to a metal cylinder called a “drum” to define a differentially charged image.
Using static electricity, the drum attracts the powdered toner from its cartridge to the drum. The drum rolls the toner onto the paper and transfers the image, heating to permanently fuse the text, images, or both, to the paper.
Laser printing produces high quality and highly personalised text and graphics, ideal for letters and single-sheet stationery. High-end lasers from Xerox and Lexmark print crisp text and images in the A6 to A3 range.
Businesses use laser printers almost exclusively because they have a reputation for reliability while producing a quality print product. Some common uses of laser printing include printing company stationery, making labels and creating corporate flyers and brochures.
What is the benefit of laser printing
The main advantages of laser printing are speed, accuracy and economy. A laser can move very quickly, so it can “write” with much greater speed than an inkjet. And because the laser beam has an unchanging diameter, it can draw more accurately, without spilling any excess ink.
What are the 7 steps of the laser printing process?
- Raster image processing.
- Load.
- Exposing.
- Develop.
- Transfer.
- Merge.
- Cleaning and reloading.
To start the laser printing process, the document is sent from the respective computer to the laser printer and the sent document is processed by the laser printer.
As soon as the print key is pressed on the computer, tablet or mobile device, the information is sent to the printer’s memory, where the data is stored.
The printer starts to warm up. This is the point at which you normally have to wait, and it is because the corona wire heats up and prepares 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 entire surface. Some printers contain four drums, one for each colour: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.
The laser is activated, and emits beams against a series of mirrors to reflect across the surface of the drum(s), printing the shape of your print using an opposing negative electrical charge.
The cartridge and toner hopper next to the drums slowly release positively charged toner particles onto the drum as it rotates. The toner is attracted to any negatively charged areas leaving the positively charged areas of the drum intact.
The transfer belt rolls the paper through the printer giving it a positive charge. As it passes through the drum, the negatively charged toner is attracted to the page in the form of your printout.
The toner is fused to the paper by hot rollers called fuser unit, and voila, your page is printed.
What does a laser printer do?
There are many different types of printer available on the market today, and each uses different technologies to achieve a similar printed page output. The laser printer was the first to be invented and was made in 1969 by Gary Starkweather while working in the product development team at Xerox. His idea was to use lasers to print an image on a copier drum which would then be transferred to paper. Hence the name “laser printing”.
So why choose laser printing over any other type of printing such as inkjet?
Well, laser printers are very efficient and cost-effective to use when you need to print in large quantities for short periods. The toner cartridges have enough capacity to print thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of pages, which is beyond the capabilities of most inkjet printers. However, as inkjet technology advances, there are now many exceptions to the rule.
Obviously if you are looking to print on other surfaces such as fabric, wood… you should take a look at our silkscreen printing or woodcut printing