The Science of Ink and Toner

It is also a widely prevalent myth that the printing technology is all about the main printing device; and that the ink or toner cartridges are just tanks of ink fluid or toner powder. And that’s the precise reason; people often turn a blind eye to the Ink or toner cartridge and also at times compromise on it by purchasing refills or remans (remanufactured cartridges).Modern printing is such a reliable, straightforward operation where most business users simply hit the print button and collect the printed document seconds later. But what goes inside the printer is a complex operation – one that is beautifully hidden from the end users.

Small (cartridge) is actually big in the case of printers as a large part of printing intelligence and smooth functioning of the printer depends on the quality of a cartridge.

Let’s start with the ink first. The ink in an original cartridge is a complex fluid which has be chemically and physically compatible with every part of the printer, including the ink cartridge components, print head, nozzles, printer parts and paper. Quality printing, especially when it comes to images or logos, requires precise placement of ink on the paper. There's very little margin for error as the naked eye notices dot-placement errors as little as 4/10,000 of an inch.

The speed and precision needed to accurately place such tiny ink drops on the page can be compared to standing at the top of a 30-story building and dropping a nickel into a bucket on the sidewalk below. An integrated circuit inside the cartridge receives data so it can manage more than 300 microscopic ink nozzles, firing up to 36,000 blasts of ink per second onto the paper.

Besides, there is a lot of research and development on ink and cartridges that goes on behind the scenes that gets barely noticed on your fabulous print. There are dedicated ink chemists and scientists with years of experience who are assigned to work on original ink formulations, which often require many years of intensive research and development.

For example, the R&D team at HP has introduced more than 100 different inks in the past 20 years alone. The ink chemistry is so advanced that the team devotes as many as 1,000 prototype formulations to perfect each new ink. It takes up to three to five years to develop and manufacture just one new line of ink, and the engineers and scientists typically devote more than 50,000 hours to developing each final ink formulation.

On the laser printer’s side, the toner in the cartridge is not a simple black powder, it contains tiny particles of ferrous oxide that get magnetically charged and are transferred to paper through the cartridge drum as part of the laser printing process. When you shoot the print command, these tiny ferrous oxide particles in the toner gets charged up which creates an electromagnetic field. The drum that is coated with toner then transfers the toner to the paper, and then finally goes through what is called a fuser to create your crisp, sharp printout. In fact, 80% of the laser printing technology resides in the cartridge; which is why you would have noticed that only an original cartridge gives excellent printing quality day after day, month after month and year after year.