laser Vs inkjet

[reviboy]

I am thinking of replacing my rather slow inkjet printer with a laser printer.

My main criteria is speed of printing and cost of running.

Please can you advise :

a) which laser to buy
b) cost of running one
c) is there a fast inkjet that might compete favourably against lasers

Thanks

Reviboy

 

[Lamoni]

I would recommend Brother laser printers. They are reasonably priced and produce better quality text than others. Almost every laser printer has significant lower printing costs than inkjet. The problem is that the initial cost of the printer is significantly higher.

The other thing with laser printers is that they print very close to the advertised print speed. With inkjet, they advertise the theoretical maximum speed. That might be obtained if you print no more than 10 words per page, but otherwise it is usually much slower.

You didn't mention what your price range was for initial cost of the printer. The more you spend, the faster it will be. A sample of Brother printers

Brother HL-1440 15ppm $200.00
Brother HL-1850 19ppm $450.00
Brother HL-2460N 25ppm $850.00

The other thing to consider is color. I seriously considered buying a laser printer for a long time because of the faster print speeds and lower printing costs, but I do too much printing in color so I would have ended up with 2 printers. I decided to just go with one and I just purchased the new Canon i850. Canon printers are the best of the inkjets as far as speed and printing costs and they produce very acceptable color images. If all you do is black and white, go with the laser.

 

[jclw]

a) which laser to buy

I'd say HP because I still use an HP LaserJet 4 that I bought in 1994.

b) cost of running one

Not sure offhand for the newer ones but much cheaper then an inkjet.

c) is there a fast inkjet that might compete favourably against lasers

My HP DeskJet 1220C spits out draft mode 8.5x11" pages (text or line drawings) in under 5secs.

- JW

*Dual PIII-800 @900 i440BX and Tualeron 1.2 @1.74 i815*

 

[blue_heart]

if you are doing lot of B&W printing then go to laser, and ithink HP is the most suitable one in laser printers.

if you are doing color prints on not larger than A4 paper, buy canon s900, fastest inkjet printer for its price range and very good colors and quality, but if you are giong to print A3 size paper buy canon s9000 (900 and 9000 the same in everything except the printed paper size)

if you do not have lot of B&W printing and have colors but u do not care about speed or quality very much then buy cheap hp inkjet printer which will give you nice text printing and acceptable color, but the disadventage is the cost of the ink.


unfortunately i am not aware of how much per page costs therfore i can not be of help, but techinically hopefully i could help

wish if there was UnDo in the life

 

[HolyShiznit]

I am thinking of replacing my rather slow inkjet printer with a laser printer

Laser printers are awesome. Go for it.

 

[heavyharmonies]

I just went through this myself, wanting to replace my HP DeskJet 930c with something a bit faster. My primary use is printing color photos, but every now and then I have lengthy B&W documents I want to print. I've found the "smudgability" tendency of inkjets to be tiring.

You may find, as I did, that the quality of the color printing on low-end color lasers to be a major step down from an inkjet. In fact, on glossy paper, at its highest quality setting, a good inkjet printer blows away *any* color laser printer... but conceivably you're willing to make a trade-off in speed/permanancy vs. quality at the high end.

You may want to consider an alternative (which I did): a Tektronix Phaser. I purchased a Tektronix Phaser 850DP, a solid ink/wax printer (original MSRP of $3,500). Xerox (who purchased the Phaser line) is selling factory refurbs with ~17,000 prints on them on Ebay in the $1,400 range.

The Phaser 850DP is 1200dpi, PostScript level 3, has 128MB RAM, and has a duplexer (automatic double-sided printing). Parallel, USB, and 10/100 connections built in.

I got lucky; I contacted one of the non-xerox sellers on Ebay. It turned out to be a computer company in Texas that is closing their showroom. The 850DP I bought was one of their floor models, and had only ever printed 24 prints (effectively brand spanking new). I was able to buy it for $1,200 net, including insured shipping. The one I got was item #2074485666. Keep an eye out; they may have more they're auctioning. I'm *real* pleased thus far.

It's a noisy printer, so if you're expecting something silent, this ain't it. The print quality at its highest setting is not quite as good as my inkjet at its highest quality setting on photo paper, but is more than acceptable. Text is very sharp; areas of solid color are where this thing shines, absolutely gorgeous. Prints are waterproof, but they can be scratched. The automatic 2-sided printing works like a charm.

One little bonus: black ink is free for the life of the printer, whether you are the original purchaser or not. Plenty of support materials (all documentation, drivers, etc.) are freely available from Xerox's web site.

If you are a business that does a fair amount of color printing, you can get one of these printers FREE, paying only for consumables; unfortunately I could not qualify 🙁. http://www.freecolorprinters.com for more information on that.

If anyone has any questions, just yell...

-Dan

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by heavyharmonies on 12/07/02 01:03 PM.</EM></FONT></P>