Buyer's Guide: Colour Laser Printers

On price alone, you might think there’d be no contest between inkjets and colour laser printers, but the strength of the latter lies in areas other than the monetary bottom line. The key advantages are all results of the technology itself: cleaner quality print, more robust documents and higher print speed. In an inkjet …

[Sooty]

I'm actually tempted by one

A long time ago, i managed to pick up and end of line proffessional quality HP inkjet, and have been reasonably happy with it over the years (xp64/vista drivers aside).

However, as i print fairly infrequently, i tend to find a lot of the time when i do need it, i need to run through lengthy cleaning cycles, or buy new ink, just to get it to work reasonably. Rather than print speed, the shelf life of the toner is what draws me. I do wonder about replacing it though, as the model i looked at, a full toner set cost nearly twice as much as the printer (with its half/quarter filed ones)

[Allan George Dyer]

Matches my experience with cheap inkjets

I print colour infrequently, an inkjet would work OK a few times, them it takes new ink and hours of repeat prints to get a barely-adequate printout. The price-per-page calculation changes when you print one page, and the ink is dry the next time.

I'm now happy with a laser.

[blackworx]

Three things

1) Lexmark beating HP? What is the world coming to?

2) Like the new style, but padding your intro out to two pages with photos of the sort you'd expect to find in an office supplies catalogue will not win you any new friends.

3) A separate comments page for each part of the article? What's going on?

[Jon Wilson]

Testing methods

Gonna share how you measured the speeds you saw? It's good form, isn't it, to show your working? :->

[John Whitehead]

Pretty pages, but...

there's no internal navigation. How do I move around this review to compare printers? You don't even put the prices on the recommendation page. I have to work really hard to extract useful information from this article.

[Tony 13]

Cost Comparisson

One of the biggest advantages I have found for Color Laser over Inkjet is the lack of waste ink. With a Laser printer you never need to clean the heads and the ink doesn't dry out if you don't print anything for a couple of days. For me this made the running costs considerably lower.