The other day, Xerox Corporation announced the development of “non-contact flash fusing” – a major technology breakthrough in high-speed color printing. The innovation enables color xerographic continuous feed printers to achieve speeds of nearly 500 color pages per minute.

By flashing a high-intensity Xenon light more than 2,000 times per second, Xerox printers fuse the color toner at speeds that rival black-and-white continuous feed printing while creating high quality images.

In conventional toner-based printers, the entire paper is heated and the toner is pressure-rolled onto the paper. This limits print speeds to only 110 pages per minute and restricted printing on surfaces that have adhesives.

Xerox’s new flash fusing method depends on newly developed color toners, which melt and fuse the image entirely through the energy from the Xenon lamps, producing up to 650 images per minute in monochrome and 493 images per minute in full color.

In order for flash fusing to work, Xerox scientists had to change how cyan, yellow and magenta toners absorb energy from light. So they created color toners that contain special energy-absorbing material. This allows the individual color toners to absorb enough energy and fuse as fast as the black toner, which absorbs all light.

As a result, the toners are laid down in the order of their absorption rate – with the black at the bottom. As each toner is overlaid on the preceding toners, the energy builds with each flash providing just the right amount of light to fuse each color perfectly.

Flash fusing is the technological cornerstone of the Xerox 490/980 Color Continuous Feed Printing System, the fastest, full-color toner-based continuous feed device of its kind
as well as the newly announced 650/1300 Monochrome Continuous Feed printer and the 495 Monochrome Duplex Continuous Feed printer: