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Printer toner cartridges are used in laser printers, unlike the liquid ink cartridges most of us are familiar with in our inkjet printers. Toner is a powdery substance found in these types of printer cartridges. The powder is essentially the ink the printer will use to create an image on a printed page.

Toner cartridges tend to cost more than inkjet printer cartridges, but they are known print more pages before they need to be replaced. Some toners can also be refilled with DIY toner refill kits that one can purchase to refill your empty printer cartridge. An alternative to refilling your own toner is to purchase recycled printer cartridges from a company that refills and refurbishes toner cartridges. This is a very environmentally friendly alternative when one considers that the majority of empty printer cartridges end up in our landfills unnecessarily.

Toners come in a number of colours – namely black, cyan, magenta and blue - much like laser cartridges, but toners are made from a variety of dry ingredients and chemicals such as plastic resins, polymers and of course the coloured pigments. The finer the toner powder in the printer cartridge, the better the print quality will be. Unlike inkjet printers, laser printer have a very important component in them – called a drum which the printer cannot function without. Much like a printer’s toner cartridge which needs to be replaced or refilled at regular intervals; the drum of a laser printer also needs to be preplaced for optimum printing results.

Simply put a beam of light or laser causes an electromagnetic reaction on the drum in the printer. This reaction is essentially the image that is in the process of being printed. The toner in the printer cartridge is then released and adheres to the drum where the image was formed. The toner is then actually melted into the fibres in the page to form the printed pages we are familiar with.