Chemical Toner Technology and The Future

Abstract

This talk is about “The Chemical Toner Technology and The Future” and its brief history, difficulty, breakthrough technology and potentials.Although chemically processed toner seemed to be more suitable than melt-mix and crush method, chemically processed toner such as suspension polymerization toner was not launched for a long time. The first reason is its difficulty of charge control and secondly poor blade cleaning applicability. Huge investment for chemical toner plant is also high barriers for hardware companies.But at the end of 90's, several powerful industries began to produce various types of chemical toners because of their technology breakthrough such as charge control improvement, micro encapsulation method establishment, shape control process and smaller particle toner manufacturing process improvement, color oil-less capability realization and so on. One of the most dominant chemically processed toner is suspension polymerization toner from Nippon Zeon and Canon and the second dominant one is emulsion aggregation method toner from Konica and Fuji Xerox.The share of chemical toner is still low compared with the conventional methods toners but considering their much higher potentials of super high print quality for graphic arts, ultimate transfer efficiency, relatively environmental advantage for CO2 reduction and other superior properties of their future possibilities, the volume of the production will increase explosively in near future.