New Printers, New Approach

Since optical and digital devices approach the imaging process from different perspectives, the technology needs to be tailored to the process. Conventional optical toner/developer and photoconductors erase all of the non-image area on the page, charging only the image area.

However, digital devices can produce much better quality with an imaging process that exposes only the image area. When lasers are asked to chisel out all the charge around characters and dots to produce the desired image, thin lines are often lost, and lines that run from the top to the bottom of the page (cross-track) typically are wider than those that run from side to side (in-track). Dot definition and edge quality can also suffer.