Lasers Set On Cheap.

Speed dosen't kill-cost wise

Color inkjet printers now account for a hefty percentage of all printer sales. That's true whether you're talking about printers for the home, small business, or office. However, while inkjets have never been as affordable and feature-filled as they currently are, they are not always the best choice. For many offices, a laser printer is still the best bet.

Laser printers, at all price points, are better than ever. While you are more or less restricted to printing in a single color, usually black, there are foil-transfer films available that allow you to add spot color.

Why would anyone want to use an "old-fashioned" laser printer when full color inkjet printers are so affordable? Two simple reasons -- speed and cost. While color inkjets have the advantage of producing color documents, many business-oriented documents, including reports, spreadsheets, and letters, are still being printed in monochrome.

Some of the more expensive inkjet printers can now rival, or in some cases, even surpass a laser printer in the speed that they can crank out monochrome pages. With many of the inkjet printers which are purchased for light-duty use, speed is not a primary feature.

Laser printers, however, have always been fast printers. It's one of the major benefits of the printing approach. Unlike inkjet printers, which build up a printed page droplet by droplet, a laser printer "writes" the entire image of a page on a special photoconductor drum using a beam of light. The drum then picks up toner, which is a mixture of powdered plastic and iron oxide (rust), and deposits the image on a piece of paper, the entire page at one time. A fuser, or heating element heats the toner, which melts into the paper, and hardens as it cools.

This process takes place very fast. Even inexpensive laser printers can churn out pages. One such printer, the Samsung Electronics ML-4500, can achieve up to eight pages per minute output. What makes this remarkable, however, is the printer's price, only $199. The ML-4500 comes with driver software, and attaches via a standard parallel printer port. Even at this low price, the ML-4500 provides sharp 600 dpi print resolution, and even a toner-saving mode so that you can get up to 3,500 pages, rather than 2,500 pages, from a toner cartridge. The ML-4500 lacks a network interface or option for one, so that it is most appropriate for use on an individual's desk.

If you need even faster output, consider the $349 HL-1250 from Brother. This printer offers up to 12 pages per minute output at 600 dpi resolution. The HL-1250 comes with two standard interfaces, parallel and USB, but you can also order an optional l0/100BaseT Ethernet interface card, which allows you to simply plug it into your network hub.

Not only are laser printers generally faster than inkjet printers, but the economics of printing are often very different, as well. For example, most inkjet printers which can accept a separate black ink cartridge for printing text will get up to about 500 or so pages from a cartridge. The average price for this cartridge is somewhere about $30, yielding a per page cost of approximately 6 cents. The toner cartridge for the Brother HL-1250 costs $100, and has a yield of about 3,000 pages. That works out to about 3.3 cents a page, or almost half as much as the inkjet printer.

Laser printers designed for even high-volume work provide even more economical per page costs. If your office prints 100 pages per month, it won't make that much of difference if you use an inkjet or laser printer. When you start printing hundreds or thousands of pages a month, per page costs (and savings) add up quickly. While thousands of pages of printing sounds like a lot, a standard case of printer or photocopier paper contains 10 reams, or 5,000 sheets of paper.

In living color 

Actually, the laser printer that can get a workout on a network isn't even technically a laser printer. The Xerox Phaser 1235 is a LED printer. The difference is a subtle one, but it makes a big difference in performance. It doesn't use a laser to write the image of a document four times (once each for each of the primary imaging colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, nick-named CYMK) on a large photoconductor drum. Instead, an LED printer uses an array of light emitting diodes, or LEDs, to image four separate small durms. With a laser printer, the paper the image is being transferred to goes over the drum four times, where each color is imaged, and each color of toner is transferred and fused to the paper.

Because each page is essentially being printed four times, once for each color, print speed on color pages is usually about a quarter of that achieved when the printer is generating single-color, or monochrome pages. So, most color laser printers, which provide about 16 to 20 pages per minute in monochrome, only pop out between three to five pages in color.

With an LED printer, such as the Phaser 1235, the image of a color page is transferred to the paper four times by four smaller drums, one for each color. The paper travels in a straight line through the printer, instead of going round the drum four times. The end result is a printer that spits Out color pages at almost the same speed as it does monochrome pages.

The Phaser 1235 is rated at 21 pages per minute in monochrome mode, and an amazing 12 pages per minute in color mode. That speed is attained at the printer's maximum resolution of 1,200 dpi. Even at that high resolution, the Phaser 1235 spits out detailed color pages many times faster than most inexpensive color laser printers.

Of course, inexpensive is a very relative term. When talking about a color inkjet, an inexpensive model might be anywhere from $50 to $100. Color laser printers are a different story. The least expensive color laser printers now available cost in the neighborhood of $1,000 after rebates and special deals. These are three-page per minute models, which output at around 12 pages per minute in monochrome. They are suitable for light duty office work, but are by no means workhorse printers.

Workgroup color laser printers from Hewlett Packard and Lexmark up the ante a bit, with most configurations useable for moderate duty printing costing between $2,000 and $3,000. The Phaser 1235 is even a bit more expensive than that, with the base model, the 1235N, starting at $3,499. That price includes a l0/l00BaseT Ethernet network adapter, but additional paper handling features, such as extra paper trays and an automatic duplexer, which lets you automatically print on both sides of the paper, are extra-cost options.

While the acquisition cost is a bit hefty, the Phaser 1235 makes up for it amply over the long run. Depending an the amount of color coverage on a page, per page costs run from 1.5 cents per page in monochrome to about 11.1 cents in color with 24 percent coverage. With many business pages averaging about 11 percent coverage, the cost per page should average in the area of 6.4 cents, which is very inexpensive compared to any inkjet printer and most other color lasers. Add in a duty cycle of up to 60,000 pages per month, and the Phaser 1235 makes lots of sense if you have large color print jobs to run.

Making the right choice

As with any major purchase, making the right choice means knowing what you really need. For moderate print volumes of monochrome pages, a laser printer such as the Samsung ML-4500, or the Brother HL-1250, can save lots of time and money over a less expensive inkjet printer. Color printers like the Phaser 1235 make great economic sense when you have high print volumes, or lots of color print jobs.

In making your choice, however, make sure that you look beyond the purchase price. A printer of any sort is a long-term investment, and differentials in operating costs add up to substantial amounts over the unit's lifetime.

Ted Needleman is the former associate publisher and editor-in-chief of Accounting Technology magazine. He is now a technology consultant and writer based in Stony Point, N.Y.