It's easy to take your photocopier for granted: you insert a sheet of paper, press a button, and the machine spits out a copy. For most offices, large or small, photocopiers are as essential to daily life as computers and printers. But have you ever wondered what goes on inside your copier?
Reflecting the image
When you press the "Start" button on your copier, a bright light travels across your document. That light, which comes from an ordinary fluorescent or incandescent bulb, bounces off your page, and causes the page's image to be reflected through a lens onto the photoreceptor drum below. By adjusting the location of the lens -- its distance from the original and from the drum -- you can cause the reflected image to be a reduced or enlarged version of the original.
Charging the drum assembly
The photoreceptor drum functions very much like that of a laser printer. It consists of a metal cylinder covered with a layer of semi-conductive material. The drum is given a positive electrical charge before each use; as it is subjected to the light reflecting off your original, the areas hit by light (i.e. the areas that are white on your original) lose their positive charge. The pattern of dark and light in your original image is imitated by a pattern of positive and neutral electrical charges on the drum. The drum rotates at the same rate that the light beam moves across the original document, so the pattern of electrical charges on the drum is built from one end of the image to the other. Since the circumference of the average drum is much smaller than the length of a piece of paper, a page is typically copied in several distinct chunks. The entire process occurs so quickly that, to the casual observer, the copier seems to copy an entire page at a time.
Coating the drum with toner
Like a laser printer, a photocopier uses "dry ink," or toner. Toner consists of a fine powder made of negatively-charged plastic particles that have been blended with a black pigment. When the toner cartridge, which houses the copier's toner, comes in contact with the electrically-charged photoreceptor drum, the negatively-charged toner particles are attracted to the positively-charged areas of the drum, forming the characters and images of your document.
Printing the page
A sheet of paper, which has been given an electrical charge by the copier's corona wire, is fed past the photoreceptor drum. The toner particles that are clinging to the drum now become attracted to the positive electrical charge on the paper. The toner transfers itself to the page, and the image is formed on paper. In order to fuse the toner particles to the page permanently, the page is fed through a pair of Teflon-coated rollers (called the fuser). The toner particles are melted and pressed into the paper fiber, and the paper is shot out onto the paper tray for you to pick it up.
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