So toner cartridges are environmentally sad, and it is nice people recycle them. What if they lasted 6 times longer and used 1/6th the toner to print good looking pages?
If you think of little toner blobs, little spheres, welded to a piece of paper, they are hollow.
Consider if they were origami
paper cubes for a moment. If you could "pop" them they would turn into 6 squares of covered area laying flat. Cunning software could know where to put each actual cube of toner to tessellate a latttice of -+, so full ink coverage would be possible.
So: sharged drum coats actual paper with sparser toner image. Fusor fuses toner to paper. New: HIgh intensity laser raster scans and explodes toner cubies/dodecahedrons/ triangle shaped puff pastries. This fills in the spaces between the toner particles in a predictable way and you have achieved laser printing.
It would be nice to think of something better but exploded pyramids tessellate gaplessly.
Maybe its less geometric than I think, If you can stuff a
wadded parachute with core of exploding (vapor expanding) water, mineral, or sugar (side effects may include breathing water or glucose) and make it into a big dot it can have any edge shapes you can make.
This all only works because we are taking a 3d sphericity and popping it into more surface coverage. There is the belief that half a toner particle is still opaque.
I do not know the numbers, but if you use the origami paper cube as the tessellation multiplier you should be able to cover 6 times as much surface with the same amount of toner so the toner cartridges last 6 times longer.
Making a toner particle that wants to explode like a pressurized paintball is likely fairly simple. If the lasers are good all they have to do is make eentsy water filled paintballs (toner particles), and of course they have the option of making pressurized gas filled paintballs instead. (forge the toner in concentrated CO2, just like making poprocks).
Unusual things suggest themselves like minerals with a lot of waters of hydration Mg5(CO3)4(OH)2·4H2O. (hydromagnesite) [link]
Magnesium is a nutrient, and the rest is edible. Wikipedia says it completely breaks down at 350 C. So apres laser that's a big poof of gas in a tiny core for a tiny toner particle.