How it Works. The Anatomy of a Laser Printer

Last Updated on June 16, 2020 by Christian Ralph

Laser printers, like all those featured on the printerland.co.uk website are quite complex in design yet actually very simple in concept.
Our range of laser printers can be found here https://www.printerland.co.uk/printers/laser

The process from digital file to printed document is fairly straight forward and needn’t be seen as a complex piece of technology to most users.

When you send your digital file to a laser printer, the printer must take the entire file and commit it to its on-board memory ready for processing. This RAM (Random Access Memory) is stored on the printers system board and is connected to an input device such as a USB or Network port. The amount of RAM directly affects how quickly data can be processed before sending it to be printed.
The actually print process begins after the full page has been transferred to the printers memory. Laser printers rely on static electricity. Laser printers use this static electricity to stick toner to the paper in much the same way that a balloon will stick to a wall if you rub it against your hair or clothing a few times first; the atoms of the 2 objects have opposite charges, so they attract to each other.
Once the toner has been transferred to the correct areas of the page, the paper then passes through the laser printers fuser which actually melts the toner to the page permanently.
The page is then ejected from the printer.

So what is a laser printer drum?

The drum cartridge is simply a cylinder made of incredibly conductive material which interacts with a corona wire which carries electricity. Whilst the drum spins as electricity flows through the corona wire, the drum becomes positively charged. The Printers PCL or PostScript driver then informs the laser printer to focus on certain points on the drum in order to discharge certain pixels. These discharged areas are used to hold the toner in the correct place to then be transferred to the paper before being fused inside the laser printer by the fuser unit.