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Background Information
Technology advances sometimes come in unexpected places. To most of us, the black powder we have been adding to copiers and printers for the last sixty years doesn’t seem to have changed very much. It certainly looks the same. But looks can be deceiving. As a result of sixty years of research and thousands of patents, today’s toners flow better, store better, fuse better, and develop more efficiently, resulting in cleaner, better looking prints. But under the surface, other technological advances in toner design have also enabled better, less expensive, and safer photoreceptor and fuser materials not to mention faster and cleaner operating machines. The newest advancement in toner technology is EA toner.

What is EA Toner?
EA Toner is chemical toner prepared by Emulsion Aggregation, or a chemical process used to “grow” very small, uniform particle sizes from even smaller (sub-micron) size toner components. The EA process can deliver the desired size and narrow particle size distribution required for excellent color image quality. This small size and the relative uniformity of all the articles in a particular “batch” of EA toner is more predictable than the conventional mechanical process of pulverizing extruded plastic for toner. It is also less energy intensive. Emulsion refers to the synthetic chemical process to form latex toner resin and aggregation means to bring the toner ingredient’s particles together to form the desired particle size and spherical shape.

How is it different from other toners?
The conventional toner manufacturing process, consists of starting with just the right plastic, melt mixing in pigment and special ingredients, and pulverizing the resulting block of composite plastic to a fine powder. Finally, the powder still has to be processed to remove oversized chunks and ultra fine particles. This multi-step process results in non-uniform angular particles with a somewhat wide size and shape distribution. As amazing as the resulting toners were, to step up to the challenges that each new generation of xerography required, the manufacturing process still limited engineers in creating toner with all the capabilities they wanted. continue reading...

Over the past several years small organizations have compiled dozens, medium-sized organizations hundreds, and large organizations thousands of printers, copiers, multifunctional devices, faxes and scanners to produce documents. These same organizations have contracted with courier services to distribute documents and invested in software applications to help manage them. Many also outsource document production and even destruction. As of 2006, Hewlett Packard has placed over 100 million laser printers in North America. Copier manufactures have installed over eight million copiers and multifunctional devices. Even with the surge of attaching documents to e-mail for distribution, faxing documents is still very popular. Two years ago FedEx bought Kinko’s. What does this marriage tell us about the connection between document production and distribution? They are a perfect match. At the time of this writing FedEx® stock is $116 per share reflecting a bullish outlook on corporate America’s appetite for outsourcing document production and distribution.

Even with the massive investments and dependence on document technology and related services, the print space in most organizations can be likened to corporate America’s junk drawer. Just like the junk drawers in our homes, print spaces are rarely managed effectively and even less rarely cleaned out and reorganized. continue reading...