Process cartridge including process components having critical image quality and life-extending process path acting regions

摘要

An electrostatographic process cartridge detachably mountable into a cavity defined by mated machine modules forming parts of an electrostatographic reproduction machine. The process cartridge includes a housing having walls defining a process chamber and a rotatable cylindrical photoreceptor mounted to the walls and horizontally within the process chamber. The cylindrical photoreceptor has a fixed rotational closed loop path within the process chamber. The process cartridge also includes plural process components including a toner image transferring component, a cleaning component, a charge erase light component, a charging component, an imagewise exposure component, and a development component, each acting along the closed loop path for consistently producing high quality toner images. The plural components each have a critical acting position spaced circumferentially along the closed loop path, and the critical acting positions include a 234° position for the toner image transferring component so as to have reliable, precise sheet feeding to an image transfer point, and a short near vertical sheet path; a 0° position for the cleaning component so as to prevent any leaking toner particles from falling backwardly and down, thus contaminating image carrying sheets moving from the transfer point to a fusing module; a 96° position for a ROS beam imagewise exposure component so as to form a latent image effectively with the ROS beam without undesirable curvature effects from a cylindrical profile of the photoreceptor; and a 163° position for the development component in order to minimize dark decay in the formed latent image prior to its development.