A dry ink powder which has been electrically charged. Used in laser printers, fax machines and copiers. Generally, the image is translated into bit mapped charges of the opposite polarity on a special drum in the printer. The toner is attracted to the charged areas, where it is transferred to paper. The toner is then "set", usually by heat.
For many laser printers such as Hewlett Packard LaserJet and Canon toner comes in a complete print cartridge which includes both the toner and the drum. These all in one print cartridges are very popular with customers. Other companies such as Brother prefer to separate out the toner cartridge from the drum unit - in theory this has benefits in terms of the overall print cost per page
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