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| Laser Toner
Cartridges. Premium high quality laser toner cartridges available in compatible and
original OEM models. Choose compatibles for your brand name laser printer from
Apple Epson Kyocera Xerox Brother HP Hewlett Packard Lexmark Sharp Canon IBM NEC TEC
Okidata Panasonic Pitney Bowes Tektronixs. Quality is always guaranteed on all our
laser printer toner cartridges. Select from a wide range of Laser Toner Cartridges for Apple Epson Kyocera Xerox Brother HP Hewlett Packard Lexmark Sharp Canon IBM NEC TEC Okidata Panasonic Pitney Bowes Tektronixslabeling machines from Brother. We also carry compatible brands that are designed to replace the more expensive OEM originals. Save up to 90%. A laser printer is a common type of computer printer that produces good quality printing, and is able to produce text and graphics. The process is very similar to the type of dry process photocopier first produced by Xerox. Indeed, the first laser printer was created by Xerox researcher Gary Starkweather (http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/jobs/garys.aspx) by modifying an Xerox copier in 1971. The design was not offered commercially until 1977 and the high price of the Xerox Star 8010 inhibited sales. The first laser printer success was the 8ppm HP Laserjet 8ppm, released in 1984 which used a Canon Inc. developed engine controlled by HP developed software. The HP Laserjet printer was quickly followed by other laser printers from Brother Industries, IBM, etc.. An electric charge is first projected onto a revolving drum by a corona wire (in older printers) or a primary charge roller. The drum has a surface of a special plastic or garnet. Electronics drives a system that writes light onto the drum. The light causes the electrostatic charge to leak from the exposed parts of the drum. The surface of the drum passes through a bath of very fine particles of dry plastic powder, or toner. The charged parts of the drum electrostatically attract the particles of powder. The drum then deposits the powder on a piece of paper. The paper passes through a fuser, which, with heat and pressure, bonds the plastic powder to the paper. Each of these steps has numerous technical choices. One of the more interesting choices is that some "laser" printers actually use a linear array of light-emitting diodes to write the light on the drum. The toner is essentially ink and also includes either wax or plastic. The chemical composition of the toner is plastic-based or wax-based so that, when the paper passes through the fuser assembly, the particles of toner will melt. The paper can be oppositely charged, or not. The fuser can be an infrared oven, a heated roller, or (on some very fast, expensive printers) a xenon strobe. The slowest printers of this type print about four pages per minute (ppm), and are relatively inexpensive. Printer speed can vary widely, however, and depends on many factors. The fastest print mass mailings (commonly for utilities) at several thousand pages per minute. The cost of this technology depends on a combination of costs of paper, toner replacement, and drum replacement, as well as the replacement of other consumables such as the fuser assembly and transfer assembly. Often printers with soft plastic drums can have a very high cost of ownership that does not become apparent until the drum requires replacement. One helpful trait is that in very high volume offices, a duplexing printer (one that prints on both sides of the paper) can halve paper costs, and reduce filing volumes and floor weight as well. Not all laser printers, however, can accommodate a duplexing unit. Many printers have a toner-conservation mode, which can be substantially more economical at the price of only slightly lower contrast. Aside from these components, typical maintenance is to vacuum the mechanism, and eventually clean or replace the paper-handling rollers. The rollers have a thick rubber coating which eventually become covered with slippery paper dust and suffer wear. They can usually be cleaned with a damp lint-free rag and there are chemical solutions that can help restore the traction of the rubber. Toner. A special type of ink used by copy machines and laser printers. Toner consists of a dry, powdery substance that is electrically charged so that it adheres to a drum, plate, or piece of paper charged with the opposite polarity. For most laser printers, the toner comes in a cartridge that you insert into the printer. When the cartridge is empty, you can replace it or have it refilled. Typically, you can print thousands of pages with a single cartridge. Laser Printer. A type of printer that utilizes a laser beam to produce an image on a drum. The light of the laser alters the electrical charge on the drum wherever it hits. The drum is then rolled through a reservoir of toner, which is picked up by the charged portions of the drum. Finally, the toner is transferred to the paper through a combination of heat and pressure. This is also the way copy machines work. Because an entire page is transmitted to a drum before the toner is applied, laser printers are sometimes called page printers. There are two other types of page printers that fall under the category of laser printers even though they do not use lasers at all. One uses an array of LEDs to expose the drum, and the other uses LCDs. Once the drum is charged, however, they both operate like a real laser printer. One of the chief characteristics of laser printers is their resolution -- how many dots per inch (dpi) they lay down. The available resolutions range from 300 dpi at the low end to 1,200 dpi at the high end. By comparison, offset printing usually prints at 1,200 or 2,400 dpi. Some laser printers achieve higher resolutions with special techniques known generally as resolution enhancement. In addition to the standard monochrome laser printer, which uses a single toner, there also exist color laser printers that use four toners to print in full color. Color laser printers tend to be about five to ten times as expensive as their monochrome siblings. Laser printers produce very high-quality print and are capable of printing an almost unlimited variety of fonts. Most laser printers come with a basic set of fonts, called internal or resident fonts, but you can add additional fonts in one of two ways: font cartridges : Laser printers have slots in which you can insert font cartridges, ROM boards on which fonts have been recorded. The advantage of font cartridges is that they use none of the printer's memory. soft fonts : All laser printers come with a certain amount of RAM memory, and you can usually increase the amount of memory by adding memory boards in the printer's expansion slots. You can then copy fonts from a disk to the printer's RAM. This is called downloading fonts. A font that has been downloaded is often referred to as a soft font, to distinguish it from the hard fonts available on font cartridges. The more RAM a printer has, the more fonts that can be downloaded at one time. In addition to text, laser printers are very adept at printing graphics. However, you need significant amounts of memory in the printer to print high-resolution graphics. To print a full-page graphic at 300 dpi, for example, you need at least 1 MB (megabyte) of printer RAM. For a 600-dpi graphic, you need at least 4 MB RAM. Because laser printers are nonimpact printers, they are much quieter than dot-matrix or daisy-wheel printers. They are also relatively fast, although not as fast as some dot-matrix printers. The speed of laser printers ranges from about 4 to 20 pages of text per minute (ppm). A typical rate of 6 ppm is equivalent to about 40 characters per second (cps). Laser printers are controlled through page description languages (PDLs). There are two de facto standards for PDLs: PCL : Hewlett-Packard (HP) was one of the pioneers of laser printers and has developed a Printer Control Language (PCL) to control output. There are several versions of PCL, so a printer may be compatible with one but not another. In addition, many printers that claim compatibility cannot accept HP font cartridges. PostScript : This is the de facto standard for Apple Macintosh printers and for all desktop publishing systems. Most software can print using either of these PDLs. PostScript tends to be a bit more expensive, but it has some features that PCL lacks and it is the standard for desktop publishing. Some printers support both PCL and PostScript.. |