ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 18 -- United States Patent no. 12,326,691, issued on June 10, was assigned to CANON K.K. (Tokyo).
"Toner" was invented by Takeshi Hashimoto (Ibaraki, Japan), Kazuki Murata (Tokyo), Yukihiro Abe (Chiba, Japan), Miki Ueda (Tokyo) and Hayato Ida (Ibaraki, Japan).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A toner comprising a toner particle comprising a binder resin, wherein the binder resin comprises a first resin and a second resin, the first resin is a crystalline resin, the second resin is an amorphous resin, and in observations of cross sections of 100 toner particles using a transmission electron microscope, (i) when an area ratio A (area %) denotes a ratio of an area occupied by t...