How the printer works
How the laser printer works: simplified diagram of printer When you print something, your computer sends a vast stream of electronic data (typically a few megabytes or million characters) to your laser printer. An electronic circuit in the printer figures out what all this data means and what it needs to look like on the page. It makes a laser beam scan back and forth across a drum inside the printer, building up a pattern of static electricity. The static electricity attracts onto the page a kind of powdered ink called toner. Finally, as in a photocopier, a fuser unit bonds the toner to the paper. Millions of bytes (characters) of data stream into the printer from your computer. An electronic circuit in the printer (effectively, a small computer in its own right) figures out how to print this data so it looks correct on the page. The electronic circuit activates the corona wire . This is a high-voltage wire that gives a static electr