Latent electrostatic image developing toner

An image forming apparatus, comprising:

• a latent image bearing member configured to bear a latent image;
• a charging unit configured to uniformly charge a surface of the latent image bearing member;
• an exposing unit configured to expose the charged surface of the latent image bearing member to light based on image data, to thereby form a latent electrostatic image;
• a developing unit comprising a developing roller and a toner-regulating blade and configured to supply a toner to the latent electrostatic image formed on the surface of the latent image bearing member to form a visible image using the developing roller and the toner-regulating blade where the developing roller is configured to come into contact with the latent image bearing member and bear the toner on a surface thereof and the toner-regulating blade is configured to regulate an amount of the toner on the surface of the developing roller and form a thin layer of the toner;
• a transfer unit configured to transfer the visible image from the surface of the image bearing member onto a recording medium;
• and
• a fixing unit configured to fix the visible image on the recording medium,
• wherein the toner comprises a core particle comprising a binder resin, a colorant and a releasing agent, and a shell on a surface of the core particle, and
• a supernatant of the toner has a transmittance of 50% to 95% with respect to light having a wavelength of 800 nm, where the supernatant is obtained by adding 3 g of the toner to 40 g of ion-exchange water comprising 0.5% by mass of sodium dodecyl sulfate to form a mixture, stirring the mixture for 90 min, irradiating the mixture with ultrasonic waves of 20 kHz and 80 W for 5 min, and then centrifuging the mixture at 3,000 rpm for 5 min.