DIGISOURCE 9110 System
Highlights

   Platform Overview 
   Image Quality
   Paper Handling
   Imaging Process 
   Printing Workflow 
   Specifications

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Not all electrophotographic processes are created equal. The use of Small Particle Developer (SPD) on the DIGISOURCE 9110 System is one reason it's image quality is best in class. Superior toning, LED writing technology, materials, process control, and fusing all contribute further to the advances in print quality. But equally important is the inherent imaging protocol used as the foundation of the DIGISOURCE 9110 System.

The compromised solution: conventional imaging systems.
Many competitive offerings have adopted the same electrophotographic process used in an optical product as the basis for digital products. This was done to avoid the need to create a unique toner and developer or photoconductor dedicated solely to a digital print system. These engines use what is referred to as a Charged Area Development system, or CAD for short. The image is created by erasing all of the non-image area on the page, leaving only the image to be produced still charged. This is easy to implement in an optical product, as the white background on the page to be reproduced reflects the light from the copier's imaging source and erases the background areas on the photoconductive surface. As these products became digitized, a laser exposure source replaced the copier's flash as the means to "write" the background.

The inherent weakness of these systems is that the laser must effectively chisel out all the charge around the characters and dots to produce the desired image. Dots and lines tend to be thinned out in these systems due to this imaging-writing process.  In fact, many high-speed printing systems using CAD technology have difficulty reproducing lines and dots that are only one pixel in size. Furthermore, lines that run in the cross-track direction (top to bottom of the page) are typically wider than those in the in-track direction (side to side of the page). Dot definition and edge quality also suffer in a CAD-based system as lines and dots are created indirectly by removing all the areas that are unwanted, as opposed to exposing those areas that are the desired image.

Superior imaging performance without compromises.
The DIGISOURCE 9110 System, in contrast, was developed to be a digital electrophotographic system. Toner and developer were created specifically to enable this system to produce the highest quality images possible. These materials, along with a world-class organic photoconductor developed exclusively for this digital process, have enabled the use of Discharged Area Development, or DAD for short. In a DAD process, only the desired image is exposed.
The advanced LED writer in the DIGISOURCE 9110 System enables precise creation of the digital image by exposing only the dots needed to create the image rather than exposing everything else, as in a CAD system. LED imaging exposes an entire line all at the same time at a fixed focal length from the photoconductor. And since there are no moving parts in the LED writer, reliability and consistency are maintained throughout the life of the product. 

The result is dot and line definition with no compromises. The LED writer produces dots and lines that are exactly symmetrical in both in-track and cross-track directions. Uniformity is maintained exactly across the entire addressable area of the page. Banding and other image artifacts are reduced further by a closed loop control that matches the line placement of image with the position of the photoconductor loop. And because this high-quality latent image is then developed by Kodak's exclusive SPD toning subsystem, the high resolution of the digital image on the photoconductor is faithfully reproduced. The small developer particle (about 1/4 the size of competitive equipment) used in SPD acts like a fine brush to produce images of uncompromised quality.

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