Tips for choosing an inexpensive color laser The last time we wrote about color laser printers, the purpose was to take note of new models costing less than $1,000 – about half of what they had cost a couple of years earlier. A little more than two years later, prices have halved again. Now it is easy to find color laser printers for less than $500. These days, color printing is almost essential in an office setting. Who would think of printing flyers and other promotional materials in plain black and white anymore? Color also adds professionalism to letterhead, business cards and even invoices. Presentations, charts, tables and other graphic materials can be enlivened substantially by the judicious use of color. Of course, color-capable ink jet printers with price tags of less than $200 are plentiful, but they are poorly suited to an office environment. For one thing, the consumables are usually expensive, especially in those printers that have one ink cartridge for all three of the primary colors. Speed is also a concern. Some cheap ink jet printers can be painfully slow when printing in color, and although inks have improved a lot in recent years, they sometimes bleed through the page or around the edges of an image. You can purchase special paper to reduce those effects, but this only adds to the cost. In contrast to the above, color images produced by a color laser are typically sharper than with ink jet, and no special paper is needed to produce good results. Cost per page is also generally lower than with ink jet printers. What do you get in a sub-$500 color laser? You can get a decent, low-volume, color printer – not one you would want to print your digital photos on, but one good enough for most other business uses. As you compare the different offerings, here are some things to consider: Memory. The more internal memory a printer has, the better it will handle graphic images. Be sure to consider both the memory the unit ships with and the maximum that can be installed. It would also be worth knowing if the printer requires proprietary memory, which is always more expensive than generic. Speed. Of course a key measure here is pages per minute in both black and color. However, “time to print the first page” is also important. Some printers do fine once they get rolling, but they take longer than others to spit out the first page. Paper handling. Consider here your expectations in terms of types of media the printer must handle, including sizes and weights of paper. It would also be wise to investigate the ease of printing envelopes. Paper capacity. Printers with primary paper trays that hold less than 200 sheets can sometimes be quite inconvenient in a workgroup setting. Cost per page in black and color. This calculation should take into consideration such relevant factors as the toner, the drum, the fuser and all other consumables, except paper. Connectivity. The question here is whether the printer is network-capable out of the box, or whether it requires additional hardware to become so. Almost any printer can be put on the network if a networked PC is assigned as its print server, but this is not as convenient as a printer that has a built-in print server. Duty cycle. This is the number of pages per month the printer is rated for. A printer with a higher duty cycle will typically require less frequent maintenance than one with a lower duty cycle. Operating systems supported. Some printers will only work in a Windows environment. That could be important to know if you are using Macs or Linux machines. Now that truly inexpensive color lasers are available, they can be an important addition to a small or medium-sized office. The excuses for sticking with plain old black and white in our printed communications are becoming pretty feeble. For comparisons of inexpensive color laser printers, the following links may be helpful:
Color Laser Printers Reviews |