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Fusers and Toners, The Jargon Explained

Sometimes if problems occur on press that have somehow evaded the eagle-eyed Quality Control Team and that continue along their destined path to the customer, it’s difficult for the usually upset customer to comprehend when you explain that “The Fuser didn’t quite Fuse the Toner to the sheet correctly resulting in this mark you’re seeing” it can just annoy them further. So, here’s a breakdown as to what happens inside a Digital Press and how all these technical words translate into something understandable.

Basically the toner is ink, in powder form. So imagine you’ve got 4 inks, CMYK as discussed in other blogs. These have a hole in the bottom of the cartridge that lets the toner out and in a similar fashion to the old iron filings trick at school, they stick to the Transfer Belt. Imagine this is a big piece of plastic that just goes round and round like a track on a tank. The image gets “dropped” onto there via the ink cartridges, then makes it’s way round where it meets the paper. The image is pressed onto the paper and so the whole process starts again. If you were to pull the sheet out now the ink would literally rub off.

It then makes its way through a giant mangle. This mangle is called a Fuser. The 2 rollers making up the mangle effect are very hot, usually in excess of 300°c. These rollers are also coated in what’s called Fuser Oil, which imagine for arguments sake is PVA glue, like at school when you used to paste PVA glue onto things to seal them, this is the same principle just more advance. The oil also adds the gloss required to give the image the quality you expect from Digital Print. The rollers combine the oil and heat and apply an even layer of this “seal” on top of the ink which then prevents it from being rubbed off. The paper carrys on through the machine getting blown by many fans to cool down the heat and it pops out the end, job done!

Below are some images that may help you get the jist of what goes on inside the Digital Press and how it produces images.