Nowadays, a high-performing 16ppm personal monochrome laser hovers around $600, while a decent colour laser model could cost you less than $2000. With the added advantages of speed and quality, as well as economic consumable use, employing laser printers in the home and small business space is fast becoming a reality.

Still not sold on whether to buy a laser printer or an inkjet? To help you make your decision, we present some of the issues and questions you should be considering when choosing a laser printer.

Printer consumables

Just how much do consumables cost? We've put this question first, because it is possibly the most important question you can ask, but is so often neglected by printer buyers. The reality is that over the lifespan of the printer, the cost of feeding the device will far outweigh the initial purchase cost. Printer vendors frequently offer cheap purchase prices in order to lock you into buying expensive toner cartridges and other consumables for all eternity.

When it comes to laser printers, the main consumable cost you will encounter is toner cartridge replacement. Check the price of toner cartridge replacements, and how many pages each will print before it dies. Calculate a cost per page (by dividing cartridge cost by the number of pages).

Printer vendors usually provide details on cartridge lifespan in the form of phrases like "will print 4000 pages at 5 per cent coverage". The percentage figure refers to how much of each page is covered in toner - 5 per cent is considered a good average for a page full of text. It's worth making sure the metrics of different printers are equal; some vendors might use different coverage percentages in their calculations (if one uses 10 per cent coverage as the basis for its pages-per-cartridge estimate, for instance, simply multiply the number of pages by two to find how many it would print at 5 per cent coverage).

It's also worth checking whether the toner cartridges can be refilled or simply need to be replaced. Before buying, check with refillers like Cartridge World (www.cartridgeworld.com.au) to see if the particular brand of cartridge you are looking at can be refilled (they may also be able to give you frank advice on the lifespan of a given cartridge). Also check the warranty conditions of the printer, to see if there are restrictions of the use of refilled cartridges. Refilling can cost as little as a third of the price of buying a new cartridge. Obviously, you can save huge amounts of money this way. You can't just refill the one cartridge for the lifespan of the printer - the cartridges will wear out - but you can get numerous uses from each. It's worth asking the refiller how many times, on average, a particular cartridge can be refilled before it becomes too dodgy for further use.

Unfortunately, if you're looking at a colour laser, you're out of luck, as no refillers yet have the ability to restore colour cartridges.

The other big consumable is the OPC drum (see the glossary for a quick description of what this does). In many printers, this has to be replaced periodically (although in some, it is part of the toner cartridge, and gets replaced along with it). Check the lifespan and the cost of the OPC drum before buying. On some printers, the OPC drum will last the life of the printer, and should never need replacing.

Finally, we should make special note of the consumables situation for colour lasers. It's a nightmare. Some colour lasers can have up to nine different consumables - four toner cartridges, the drum, a fuser unit, fusing oil, a waste toner bottle and a developer unit. Before buying a colour laser, ask exactly what needs to be replaced, how often, and at what cost.

Printer specifications: Resolution

The quality of the print you get from a printer is indicated by its resolution. Resolution is defined by the number of dots in a square inch (dots per inch or dpi) that a printer can distribute across a sheet of paper.

Most mono laser printers offer a maximum print resolution of either 600 by 600 dpi, or 1200 by 1200 dpi. Currently, 600dpi is more or less the standard. Colour lasers can offer a resolution range of up to 2400 by 1200 dpi, although 1200 by 1200 is more common.

When it comes to lasers, resolution is a more important measurement to consider when printing graphics than text. In-built fonts and text engines in most lasers make a pretty good fist of printing text even at 300dpi, because the printer can deal with the information intelligently.

Graphics are the kicker. If you plan on printing a lot of them, then a high-resolution printer is a good idea. If it's mainly text that you're looking at, don't worry too much about resolution.

In addition to normal resolution levels, printer manufacturers may offer an "optimised" resolution range across some models. The term optimised encompasses the use of software and proprietary technologies to interpolate an image and to smooth out patches of colour, fill in gaps, and sharpen more detailed sections.

Hewlett-Packard for example, touts its own printing proprietary solution called Resolution Enhancement Technology (REt), which it claims increases the effective resolution of the printer. Epson also boasts of its own printing enhancing technology called AcuLaser Line Screen Technology. According to Epson, the technology determines whether high definition or high gradation is needed for each image and assigns the process that gives the best results.

Before you believe the technology hype, get the store to print something out for you, and then compare printouts from different models for yourself.
 

How fast is it?

This question really only matters in high-volume environments. For most small offices, the difference between 16ppm (pages per minute) and 24ppm is superfluous. The spooling and processing time (the time before the document even starts printing) is more of an issue, and this largely depends on the software and speed of the print server and the printer processor. There's also the matter of the speed at which the printer warms up. In a way, this is part one of the speed issue.

The final part is the actual output of the paper. Just how quickly -- once all the thinking and warming up has been done by the print engine -- does it spit the paper out? The best way to know is to ask the retailer for a demo. In this case, you can time just how long the page takes to print from the moment you click 'print' to the moment the page has been printed. Do this on a few printers in various price brackets in the store and you should notice a difference.

It is worth noting that the speed of printers tends to be, shall we say... exaggerated. The ppm rating on printers definitely falls into the category of 'best-case scenario'. If you're printing lots of graphics, for instance, expect nothing even approaching this rate.

Like the processors in PCs on sale today, print controller processors also vary in power. Expect to see a range on offer from 33MHz to 400MHz, and a good many speeds in between.

Duty cycle ratings

Most manufacturers give their printers a duty cycle rating, citing how many pages per month the printer is capable of handling. This, of course, is only a recommendation and not a hard limit. It can be a good comparative measure of the durability of a given printer, although manufacturers can be given to hyperbole. It's most useful for comparing printers within a given range (one Oki printer with another Oki printer, for instance).

Memory specifications

Unlike inkjet printers, which have set memory capabilities, the installed memory within laser printers is often upgradeable. As a result, although most models will have a certain amount of memory installed (SIMM or DIMM), consumers will also find technical specification sheets list the product's maximum upgradeable memory as well.

Upgrading the memory in your printer gives the printer greater processing speed, thereby allowing the printer to process large graphics and documents with ease. In addition, more memory gives the printer the ability to store downloadable fonts from the PC.

Standard installed memory on laser printers varies drastically, ranging from 32MB to up to 128MB of memory. Maximum upgradeable memory recommendations also vary, and in some high-end models, are up to 1024MB.

To attain greater memory capabilities, many printer manufacturers include spare memory slots within their printer models. HP for example, offers a range of memory items called DIMMs, specialised for each product. These can be used in the additional DIMM slots to expand a product supplied with 16MB of RAM to one with 128MB of RAM.

Hard Drives

Some printers will also feature a built-in hard drive, or an option for a hard drive. Like memory capacity, hard drives may be upgradeable. This is good for consumers, as printer models which have a hard drive can store fonts and documents for tasks such as secure printing. More storage on the laser printer itself also makes printing mulitiple pages quicker and more efficient.

Font specifications

Fonts are an interesting issue. The presence of resident fonts in the printer can increase the speed and print quality of documents, although this is less of an issue than it was. File fonts and high memory in the 'nice to have, but hardly crucial' category. The computer that you're printing from or the print server can effectively make up for the shortfall in fonts and memory by transferring new fonts and only parts of the document at a time. It will take longer, and use some of some of the PCs resources.

Special media support

One of the big questions you need to ask before buying a laser printer is whether you want to print on large-format paper. It makes a big difference to the purchase cost, although printing on A3 can, at times, be very useful. It's also worth asking whether the printer can handle special media: small format, envelopes or cards, for instance. Inkjets tend to handle such media the best, but some lasers can do a decent job. The ability of a laser to deal with special media largely depends on the print path - whether the paper is fed straight through or has to be turned around a roller.

Duplexing printers can also be very handy for many kinds of documents, and are a boon for those who wish to save paper. A duplex printer can turn the paper over and print on both sides in one run.

Trays and paper feeds are mostly a matter of convenience: how often you have to refill the tray, or whether you have to manually load A3 paper every time you want to use it. Larger printers will have multiple tray options. Choose carefully.

The colour laser printer is one device that many consumers may have never even dreamed about owning because of their seemingly high price tags and large size. The reality is that the majority of these devices are now quite compact and relatively cheap to purchase for the home, and especially the office: you can easily find colour laser printers under the $2000 mark.

Laser printers have several advantages over their inkjet counterparts, especially for organisations with high-colour printing needs (such as design houses).

The big colour advantage over an inkjet is that colour lasers don't need special media (which, for inkjets, can cost $2 or more per page). They are also much faster than inkjet and other impact printers, and the output is far superior, since the toner doesn't bleed, splatter or smudge, as is the case with some inkjets.

Up until a few years ago, colour lasers were very slow, because printing required four passes (one for each of the printing colours - see the glossary). The introduction of LED printers (see the glossary) has allowed them to be compact enough to do one-pass printing (with four separate drums), which provides a massive speed increase - making these types of printers much more efficient.

Networking support

Network printers, a.k.a. workgroup printers, can be connected directly to local area networks and frequently do not require an external print server (i.e., the print server is built-in).

Network printers tend to be large, high-volume printers targeted at enterprises and are priced accordingly. In most SOHO scenarios, it's more practical to connect a printer to one of the office PCs or the office server (or a low-spec dedicated PC) and share that printer using standard networking tools (such as Windows printer sharing).

The crux of it is, if you work in a SOHO environment and have a spare old PC laying around, it may be best to set up that PC as a print server (using Windows printer sharing, for instance) rather than fork out the extra for a workgroup printer.

It's also worth noting here that printers that connect to the PC via the USB port are generally better than parallel port printers on the speed-front, since the USB port has quicker transfer rates (many current printers have both, and even allow multiple PCs to connect directly to the printer at once).

Other considerations: The printer driver

The printer driver is important when choosing a printer for two reasons: it acts as the interface software between your PC and the printer, and it is the access point that allows you to control the media stock and print quality from your desktop.

If possible, get a demonstration of the driver and other software in action before you buy. How much control over the quality of the printout does it give you? How easy is it to switch the default paper size from Letter to A4 (a surprising bugbear in a number of printer drivers)? How well does it allow you to manage pending jobs?

Perhaps most importantly, what kind of feedback does it give you about the printer status - how much toner is left, what is the printer currently doing and why is the printer not working the way it should?

This illustrates one of the key points when buying a laser printer - especially one for which you are handing over a considerable amount of money. Get a demonstration, if you can. It could save you a lot of pain in the long run.

Is it environmentally friendly?

There are a lot of tricks that printer manufacturers can pull to save the environment - and the money and health of the buyer. Some things to look for include power consumption, power saving modes (such as whether the printer only warms up when used), ozone filters (to prevent excessive ozone emissions from the printer), cartridge refilling and cartridge disposability.

Kyocera deserves special praise in terms of the environmental-friendliness of its printers. Even the toner cartridges are built from plastics that release no toxic gases when incinerated.