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Color & Monochrome Lasers
We tested 4 color and 9 monochrome laser printers, and evaluated each on speed, print quality, expansion options and price. Which one would be the best choice for you? Let's find out...
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Laser printers have been around since 1971 and yet they're hot in demand
even today. Many exciting things have happened to this category over the recent
past. For one, the cost of owning and running a laser printer has come down
dramatically. From being an enterprise level product that was only meant to be
shared by a group of people, lasers have even reached the personal desktop,
making it an ideal choice for the senior management.
Color laser printers have been talked of for quite some time, but it's only
recently that their costs have come down considerably for any office to consider
them seriously. With this, their adoption rate should increase considerably in
the near future, thereby allowing color printing of office documents in the
workplace. Looking at this trend, for the first time, we decided to also include
color laser printers in our shootout.
This time, we asked for monochrome lasers that fall between 20 to 40 ppm, and
color lasers with print speeds of up to 20 ppm. After receiving the models, we
further sub-divided the color lasers into two categories, and monos into three.
This decision was taken to ensure a fair comparison. The categories are as
follows:
Color Lasers:
1. Entry level
2. Mid range
Mono Lasers:
1. Personal mono lasers
2. Small workgroups
3. Medium workgroups
Before we get into the shootout, let's answer a few pressing concerns every
organization is facing today.
| Oh! for some more RAM |
| What do you do if you regularly print very
heavy pages and find your printer to be too slow? Your answer is to go in
for some extra RAM. And all but two of the color models reviewed here have
the facility of taking in extra RAM. But there is a catch, and a big one
at that. The price of extra RAM may be more than that of the printer
itself.
For example, the Samsung CLP-510 lists at Rs 20,000 and
an extra 128 MB of RAM will cost you Rs 22,000! And at the mid level, the
HP 3000dn costs Rs 94,000, while a RAM upgrade will set you back by
another Rs. 31,377. We tried talking to the vendors about this . To start
with, most of them were extremely hesitant to give us the price of the
extra RAM. And one of them even argued that no one really uses extra RAM.
We wonder why then do most models come with the option? In the good old
days, printers would use standard RAM. Our guess is that as with
cartridges, RAM also gives some extra margin!
The problem here is that you will realize you need more
RAM only after you have purchased and installed your printer, and by then
you are stuck with it. A good rule of thumb to use when purchasing would
be to check installed RAM and the price for atleast 256 if not 512 MB of
total RAM if you plan to print heavy
pages, regularly. |
Laser MFD or Laser Printer?
We've already seen inkjet based MFDs overtaking inkjet printers, so the same
question for lasers is only natural. Today you can buy an entry level mono
laser-based MFD at a decent price tag of 18k, which includes a scanner, digital
laser copier, PC fax and a telephone handset. Likewise, a higher end laser based
MFD can even work as an organization's communication hub. Laser based MFDs
definitely have an advantage there, but that doesn't mean you should replace
all your laser printers with laser based MFDs. They will remain for the simple
reason that the usage for various functions of an MFD varies across every
department in an organization.
Not everybody needs to send out the same number of faxes, nor does everybody
require so much scanning. Everbody on the other hand needs to print, making a
strong case for laser printers. Also, when it comes to bulk purchase, laser
printers would still be more cost effective than laser MFDs.
Color or mono?
If you have high volume color printing requirements in the office, then go for
color lasers. They are definitely more economical than color inkjets. After
comparing the cost per print of the color lasers we received, we found that each
page on an average for a color laser can cost as low as Rs 3.12. The cost of a
color inkjet print however would be more.
How we tested
We used an Intel P4 3.2 GHz system with 512 MB RAM running on Win XP. All the
printers had a USB 2.0 interface, with a few having network interfaces and even
a parallel port. When a printer had both USB as well as Ethernet support, we
tested with the latter. It was done on an isolated network so that there was no
unnecessary traffic to hinder our test.
We performed ten tests for each printer to check for quality and speed of
printing. The tests were done using Word 2000, CorelDraw 9, and Adobe PhotoShop
7. Each test was repeated thrice and its average was considered. If the
difference between any two readings was more than 10 percent, the test was r
peated.
Print speed: We measured the printing speed using the following
mechanisms:
1. Time taken to print first page of a multi-page document.
2. Time taken to print multiple pages.
3. Time to print multiple copies of the same page.
4. Time to print a single page with a small graphic.
5. For color lasers, a 16 MB full-page photograph was printed and the time
recorded.
Print quality: After setting each printer to the maximum print
resolution it supported, we checked for the following:
1. Smallest readable font.
2. Full-page monochrome graphic.
3. Line art and curves.
4. Sharpness of a wedge patch: A wedge patch is a circle with many lines
extending out from the center towards its periphery. A good printer should be
able to replicate this with all the lines clearly visible, even at the center,
and without any overlaps or patches.
5. Quality of fountain fills: This is a smoothgradient of shades of gray.
We checked how accurately each printer was able to replicate this without any
banding.
6. Quality of full-page color image: Here, we have taken a full color image
print on plain paper as well as on photo paper and then compared the quality.
All the above tests were done on A4 Xerox paper. For color photo printing, we
used 173 GSM photo paper.
Features and upgradability: What can you upgrade in a printer and by
how much? We looked for the following:
1. Memory: How much RAM does a printer ship with and what's the maximum it can
support?
2. Network: What are the various protocols and platforms that the printer
supports? How many network cards can it take?
3. Accessories: These include extra input trays, feeders, output bins,
duplexers, etc. These are all optional, and we checked how many did each printer
support.
4. Ease of upgrade: We looked at how easily you could access the different parts
inside to upgrade the printer, like adding a hard disk, more memory, or a
network card. We also checkedwhether a printer had its own proprietary memory
modules or if regular SDRAM could
be used.
5. We also looked for ease of setup, and configuration, printing modes, recovery
from paper jam, support for multiple platforms and other features, if any.
Pricing: Here we considered the actual cost of each printer, the cost
of its toner cartridge, cost of a RAM upgrade, and warranty.
Lastly, we used the Brown Gibson model to arrive at the weightages, which
were then used for the rankings. Next Page : Entry Level Color Laser Printers Page(s) 1 2 3 4 5 6
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