Laser Printers Continued…

Until recently, laser printers were too expensive for many small businesses. Recently, however, the price has dipped sharply and laser printing technology has become affordable even for personal computers. Despite their higher initial price, laser printers are often more cost-efficient than inkjet printers. Ink cartridges are extremely expensive and need to be replaced more frequently than the toner cartridges in many laser printers, and inkjet printers require higher quality paper to prevent bleeding and produce the same sharpness and resolution as laser printers.

The primary disadvantage of laser printers is that most do not print in color. Color laser printers remain extremely expensive and inaccessible to most small businesses. For high volume, high quality monochrome printing, however, laser printers remain your office's best bet.

Questions To Consider When Purchasing a Laser Printer

Volume – Some printers are built to handle higher printing volumes than others. For an individual user with printing requirements of around 200 pages per week, a personal level printer will generally be adequate. Office-level printers have longer-life consumables (toner) and are designed to be shared by a small group of users, handling a volume of up to 2500 pages per week. Higher-volume workgroup printers are designed with extra attention to job spooling and separation features, making them ideal for use by larger groups of users. Production printers are used for sustained high-volume printing of up to 750,000 pages per week.

Resolution – Most laser printers come with an average resolution of 300 dpi and that is adequate for the vast majority of print jobs. A higher, 600 or 1200 dpi, resolution may be useful for users who print complex graphics or gray-scale images such as photographs and users who frequently print documents that will be photocopied. Photocopies of 600 dpi print jobs will often be equal in quality to 300 dpi originals.
Paper Storage – If a printer will be handling particularly long documents, or is shared among several users, it is often worthwhile to buy extra paper storage space to prevent the frustration and wasted time that occurs when a printer runs out of paper mid-job.

Warm-up Time – Along with general initialization, laser printers must heat the fuser to operating temperature before they can be used. On personal and office printers, this often takes a minute or less; on some workgroup and production printers, it can take as many as fifteen. If the printer is likely to have considerable idle time, a fast warm-up time is important, as there can otherwise be a significant delay before the printer is ready to print.

Single- or double-sided? – Double-sided (“duplex”) printing is often an optional extra on laser printers. Duplex printers are more mechanically complicated than simplex printers, and therefore more likely to jam, but should be considered by users who wish to minimize their paper usage, and are a necessity for those involved in production printing. If only occasional double-sided jobs will be needed, a printer that allows manual duplex operation (most do) should be adequate.

Fonts – All laser printers have a number of fonts built in. For some, the list of available fonts is long, for others it is basic. Additional fonts may need to be purchased as extras.

By Kerry Given