Buyer’s guide: how to buy a laser printer for home or small business
By Anne Ward
Inkjet printers may be the most popular type due to their cheap initial purchase price, but the ink costs really mount up over time. In this buyers’ guide, we’ll look at a much more economical option: laser printers for home and small business use.
Laser printers offer a plethora of options, and it can be hard to tell which one offers both a good purchase price and good value running costs over the longer term.
First up, let’s establish your needs so you can go in search of a printer with appropriate features:
Home user
- Occasional, low-volume printing of forms, school projects, letters
- low up-front cost more important than ongoing running costs due to the small volumes being printed
- colour printing useful for newsletters and photos – but only if affordable!
Small business user
- regular printing of invoices, letters, etc
- ongoing running costs more important than initial upfront cost
- inbuilt fax and copying capability may be a bonus
- ability to connect directly to a network a must so printer can be easily shared between multiple users
- colour printing may be useful for printing of promotional documents
Academic/student
- frequent printing of long reference documents
- direct PC connection via USB probably OK, but network connectivity an advantage
- colour printing probably not necessary
Print quality / resolution
Printing quality is described in “dots per inch” (DPI). Laser printers generally offer 600 – 1200 dpi printing, and this is adequate to provide sharp printed text and reasonably smooth photos.
Printing speed
Printers always quote a “per page” print speed, but be aware that this is the print speed after the printer has done the initial processing work required to render a page visually. So, even though a printer may list a very fast speed like 24 pages per minute, it may still take minutes to spit out the first copy of a document.
A more accurate measure is “first page print speed”, but not all manufacturers offer this.
All that said, because processors are now so fast and cheap, most laser printers currently on the market are so fast that print speed is not a huge concern any more.
Paper handling
A key difference between cheaper laser printers and slightly more expensive ones is their paper holding capacity. The cheapest lasers – around the $100 - $150 mark – will only have enough space for 50-100 sheets in an inkjet-printer style feeder. Pay a little extra – e.g. $200 - $300 and you can expect your printer to hold 250 sheets.
However, for the cheaper printers it may be possible to buy an additional paper tray that clips on to the bottom of the printer to hold 250 - 500 sheets, so don’t assume you need to buy a more expensive printer to get greater paper capacity.
Some printers offer special envelope feeders to provide wrinkle-fee printing of envelopes too.
If you are planning to print cards and labels, make sure you check the maximum thickness of paper the printer can handle. Some printers will handle card much better than others. A “straight through” paper feed, where paper goes through the back of the printer and out the front in a straight line without curling may assist with the printing of certain types of paper/card.
Double-sided printing
Double-sided printing (duplexing) used to be the exclusive domain of printers for corporate workplaces costing thousands of dollars. Now, you can get a printer for as little as $300 that will provide double-sided printing (e.g. the Lexmark E250DN). It’s well worth considering, because it will save you money in paper costs – not to mention saving a few trees too.
Service options
Most laser printers come with a 12 month warranty, and will often give good service for five years or more. Repairs are less of a problem these days than they once were, simply because laser printers are so cheap to buy that it’s not disastrous if it turns out they can’t be easily repaired – you can simply buy another one.
That said, beware laser printers from non-traditional electronics brands that are considerably cheaper than those from established brands. It may be impossible to get the printer fixed down the track when something goes wrong.
Toner costs
The most important thing you must do before buying a printer is to find out what the replacement toner cartridge costs. A $120 printer may have a $250 toner cartridge replacement cost, which will wear you thin before long.
Colour laser printers are particularly bad in this respect, though some manufacturers price their consumables fairly. Be aware that depending on the design of the colour laser, there may be many different consumables you will have to periodically replace on top of the cartridges – the drum, the fuser unit, fusing oil, a waste toner bottle, and a developer unit. It’s a bit of a nightmare, and this alone may be enough to put people off buying a colour laser. After all, it’s a perfectly legitimate strategy to have a mono laser for your day-to-day printing needs and a colour inkjet for special colour documents.
You can get an idea of how many pages you will be able to print from one cartridge (on a mono laser) or a set of cartridges (on a colour laser) by looking at the manufacturer’s data sheet. Generally they will stipulate the number of pages based on a 5 per cent toner coverage on each page, which is a reasonable estimate for a page of mainly text. A full page photograph will have much heavier toner coverage, e.g. 80%, so be sure to think about what type of documents you will be mostly printing when looking at the manufacturer’s claims.
Mono laser printer cartridges can be refilled and used again (or you can purchased a “reconditioned” cartridge from a remanufacturer.) These generally offer reasonable results, though you’re more likely to see toner dirt and marks appearing on your prints every now and again. Since they can be as cheap as a third of the cost of an original cartridge, it can be worth considering.
Colour laser printer cartridges are generally not able to be refilled because each manufacturer’s colour toner is specially formulated and matched to the printer’s fuser temperature, etc.
In some printers, you will have to periodically replace the print drum too. This is the photosensitive drum that reacts to the printer’s laser beam and picks up toner to imprint the image on the page. In some printers, the drum is replaced as part of every toner cartridge, but in other printers it’s something that has to be periodically replaced.
Software support
Even though there have been some attempts to make printing a standard system, via page description languages like PCL and Postscript, unfortunately each printer still needs its own device driver for each different version of each operating system.
So, make sure you check that the printer comes with a device driver compatible with the OS you will be using. This is particularly important if you are using a recently released operating system like Windows Vista or Mac OS X Leopard.
Connection options
Almost all printers now have USB connectors for easy connection to modern PCs. These are compatible with PCs and Macs. A word of warning: make sure you install the device driver software for the printer before plugging it in on Windows, otherwise you may have difficulties installing the device driver later.
If you have a very old PC, you may not have USB ports, so you’ll need to look for one of the few printers that uses an older style 25-pin Parallel port. This can be tricky, so another alternative is to get a plug-in IDE or PCI card for your PC that adds USB capability. These are very cheap, and as long as you are running a reasonably up-to-date version of Windows, such as Windows 2000 onwards, you’ll have no trouble installing the USB drivers.
Network options
It has always been possible to connect a printer to a network, but usually it has been an expensive exercise involving a separate print-server box that can cost more than the printer itself.
Now, more and more printers are conveniently coming with networking ports built in. Some even have WiFi for direct connection to wireless networks.
There are extraordinarily cheap printers with networking built in. For example, the Lexmark E120N can be purchased for around $150 and has a 10/100 Mbit/s Ethernet port that can be connected directly to a home broadband modem/router. As a result, multiple computers at home can print directly to the printer, even over a wireless network if you have one. (Note, in this case, the printer must be connected to the router using an Ethernet cable, but if there are computers accessing the network wirelessly, they will be able to print without having to have the printer plugged in directly to those PCs.)
Extra features?
Some printers offer fax and scanning capability on top of their laser print engines. This can be a handy add-on. However, as noted in the “software compatibility” section above, it’s important to check that the printer comes with appropriate software for your operating system to drive these features.
Related:
