On-demand printing toner

Toner is a liquid or dry powder mixture that is commonly used as an "ink" for electronic reproduction equipment. Digital printing companies rely on this material for imaging and printing companies rely on ink printing to be just like printing. Whether it is black and white toner or color toner, it is of great importance to the digital printing company's product quality and production costs.

Offset companies often purchase ink directly from ink companies, and most digital printing companies purchase toner directly from their equipment suppliers rather than from independent toner manufacturers. However, this can't be generalized. Some third-party toner manufacturers sell their products directly to equipment dealers so that they can share a glass of food. Even some famous ink manufacturers sometimes process toners for equipment manufacturers.

For equipment suppliers, since toner is an important part of the supply revenue stream, and it also brings users significant differences in quality and cost, these companies have invested a lot of manpower and material resources in R&D and market development. . Despite this, some experts from Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, Canon, and Océ believe that the current toner performance has been optimized, and the future focus of research and development may be mainly in the field of inkjet. Breakthrough in chemical reagents

In recent years, the most important breakthrough in toner development is the development of chemical toners for color printing. Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Konica Minolta and Xerox have introduced new products. According to Xerox, the traditional toner is a mixture of plastics, toners, and additives, ground to a fine powder, and then screened to remove large particles and fine particles. Each method is to generate smaller, more uniform particles. Canon uses suspension polymerization technology, while Xerox and Konica Minolta use emulsion polymerization (EA) technology to increase toner particle size rather than grinding.

Canon has a product called S toner (S-Toner) that is produced using polymerization technology. Using this technique, monomers and waxes and pigments are carefully mixed together and dispersed in polymer particles. Then fine particles with similar side lengths can be produced. The inner layer of the particles is a wax. For the polymer.

Konica Minolta's chemical toners and Xerox's EA toners use an emulsion polymerization method to increase the fineness of very small (micron) toner particles and produce very uniform particle sizes.

With these toners, the sharpness of printed images is high, the quality of lines and texts is greatly improved, the stability is also very good, and the service cost is low, which has great market potential. Xerox EA toner particles can be as small as 5 microns, while Canon's products can be as small as 7.5 microns. At present, the development in this area has just started and the prospects are very bright. Xerox's DocuColor 2240, 1632, and 3535 products now use EA toner, and other products in the DocuColor series are also planned to use this technology in the future. Which of the traditional technologies and new technologies are better cannot be generalized, but mainly related to the entire system.

In the process of color digital reproduction, many system problems ultimately come down to toner problems. For example, in monochrome printing, if the dots change, the gray color turns to light gray and it can be seen at a glance. However, in color printing, what is seen is not a change in the shadow but a change in color. The long-term stability of the product is a problem for the entire system. Every user needs a very stable product, which poses a greater challenge to the toner particle size.

For example, Xerox's DocuColoriGen3 does not use EA technology. EA and iGen3 are developed at the same time, and the toner formula used by iGen3 is the most complicated one ever developed by Xerox. Although it is a traditional toner, its particle size and dispersibility are very good. And the color space and gloss are very satisfactory.

Canon Inc. has a similar example. The latest S-type toner has been applied to some products, but the company's best product CLC series still uses the traditional ultra-fine, super-gloss toner to best make originals. The copy.

Liquid ink

Developers did not stop their own pace with traditional dry toners and chemical toners. Some manufacturers have developed liquid inks, such as the original Indigo company. Indigo's patented product, ElectroInk, launched in 1993 with the E-Print1000 is one of its major selling points. Now HP is still doing the subsequent development of the product. The print quality of this product can be compared with that of offset printing products, and the printed particles controlled by the computer can be as small as 1 micron, which is why it is named "electronic ink".

Dry toners are pre-packaged pigments that are either ground or polymerized to produce an ink particle size of 5 microns without undergoing a dissolving process. They are only melted and transferred onto paper when printed. . The discrete particles in the liquid ink are suspended in the liquid and can be very small in size. In addition, some dispersants, binders, and toners can also be added. Then, chemical charges are generated on the surface of the particles, and electric fields are used to move around. This ink has more similarities with offset inks, which is why it can reproduce high quality products.

Dry toners are usually heated and pressed during printing, while liquid inks (such as ElectroInk) use thermal, chemical, and mechanical energy to form a colored polyethylene film on the surface of the substrate.

Due to the long-lasting stickiness of ElectroInk inks, specially coated substrates were used at the beginning, and now the range of papers that HP Indigo digital printers can print has already been expanded, and the company is still investigating the chemistry of the paper surface. For further research, their goal is to achieve perfect printing on paper that performs well, is reasonably priced, and readily available (just like offset paper).

Black toner

The development of black toner has been more than 60 years old. For color toners, the goal is to lower prices; for black toners, it is to produce smaller particles. Because the size of the toner particles is critical to the quality of the image. The smaller the particles, the more gray levels, the higher yield, and the better coverage.

In addition, some companies are also trying to develop more products for users to choose from quality and economics, such as Océ company's VarioStream presses launched on Xplor2002, mainly for the IT and commercial printing market, can achieve 300dpi file printing And 600dpi short edition printing.

There are four kinds of toners for VarioStream: standard black, the most economical consumables for document printing, most customers will choose it; advanced black, with finer particles, suitable for technical manuals with pictures, dots and thin lines Or the production of a project proposal, the conversion between these two products is very quick and easy, and there is no need to worry about the cleaning of the equipment, and the quality and cost are reasonable; in addition, there are spot-colored toners, which can be used to reproduce the highlights. Color ink, which can be spot color, can also be a custom company logo color, can also quickly replace the ink cartridge; the last is MICR toner for the financial industry, in which the toner contains a certain metal composition, can detect the letters The magnetic properties.

Océ recently added a transponder to its toner bottle to allow VarioStream to test the suitability of the toner. If it does not match, the device will not operate.

future

The continuous efforts of developers are to reduce the size of toner particles, increase production efficiency and reduce costs. The development potential and market opportunities for toners are huge, especially for chemical toners.

Source: Ke Yin Network