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How Photocopiers Work

Lamp and Lenses

A strong lamp illuminates the sheet of paper to be copied.

Making a photocopy requires a light source with enough energy to boot electrons out of the photoconductive atoms. What wavelengths of light can do this? It turns out that most of the visible spectrum of light contains enough energy to drive the process, especially the green and blue end of the spectrum. Anything lower than the red portion of the visible spectrum doesn't have enough gusto to activate the photoconductor. And, although UV light has more than enough firepower to make a photocopy, it can be very damaging to our eyes and skin. This is why photocopiers use a plain old incandescent or fluorescent bulb to flash light onto the original document.

When the lamp in the copier is turned on, it moves across the inside of the copier, illuminating one strip of the paper at a time. A mirror attached to the lamp assembly directs reflected light through a lens onto the rotating drum below. The lens works just like the one on your camera. It allows you to focus a copy of the image in a specific place. Although you can't really focus the image on a photocopier to make the final product more or less blurry, you can change the distance between the lens and the original or between the lens and drum to either reduce or magnify the size of the original image on your copy.

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