Laser printers use static electricity to create an electrostatic image on a drum, which is then coated with toner and transferred onto paper. Color laser printers use a CMYK process, with different methods affecting quality, speed, and price. Consider printing speed, toner cost, and resolution when buying a color laser printer. Cheaper printers are simpler, while more expensive ones have a complete system for each color. Laser printers are better for text and presentation documents, while photo-quality printers are more expensive.
A laser printer is a specific type of printer, which works on a similar principle to a copier or multifunction printer. Unlike an inkjet printer, however, where tiny jets of ink are sprayed onto paper, laser printers work on the simple principle of static electricity. Basically, a laser writes on a positively charged central drum, creating an electrostatic image of what will be printed. Once the laser has drawn its image, the drum is coated with a fine black powder, the same type of toner used in copiers, which is then spread onto the paper. The powder sticks to the positively charged sections of the drum, the same way a sock might stick to your clothes if it were charged with static electricity, and only the powder on the negative image is allowed to fall onto the paper.
It’s easy enough to see how this can produce great black and white pages, but a color laser printer is a little more complicated. Essentially, it runs the same process four times, once for each of the colors cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, a so-called CMYK process. There are several ways to do this, and how it is done affects the quality and speed of the print and the price of the printer.
The simplest color laser printer would have a single drum and roll four different colors for each page. A slightly fancier setup would do a similar thing, except it would first print the four colors on a plate and then print the plate onto the page. The more complex, and therefore more expensive, type of color laser printer has a complete system, drum, toner and laser, for each color that needs to be produced, making for assembly-line-style printing.
When looking to buy a color laser printer, there are several things you can look at. First of all, you need to decide how much you are willing to spend. If your funds are limited, your options to choose from will be limited, as most printers that cost less than a few hundred US dollars (USD) will be of the simpler variety. If you have more money available, you can start looking at different numbers and options.
One of the most important numbers to consider when buying a color laser printer is the printing speed, expressed in terms of pages per minute. Since a black and white copy only needs to use one drum head and toner, they are normally much faster, so will tend to be given different numbers for black and color prints. Unlike inkjet printers, which have a huge speed difference between sheets of images and text, a color laser printer will be much the same. A fast high-end color laser printer will have between 16 PPM and 26 PPM for color prints and maybe even more for black and white prints.
You will also need to look into the cost of toner for your printer. One reason people tend to like laser printers is that while the initial unit is so much more, over time the lower cost of toner compared to inkjet cartridges more than the unit pays for. Make sure the unit you’re looking at has affordable toner cartridges, and remember that while the initial price for a cartridge is high, it lasts for many pages. Resolution may also be important to you, and you should know that many laser printers are designed primarily for text and presentation documents, so if you plan on printing images make sure you buy a much more expensive photo-quality laser printer.
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