If you are looking forward to high quality prints, laser printers are the best bets. There are many other advantages of laser printers over inkjet ones…
In the computers and electronic market, there are a wide range of devices that are incorporated with the best of technologies. Printers are one of the devices, which are being introduced with the latest features such as scanning, faxing, and other facilities built in. If you are looking for maximum speed and accuracy, laser printers are one of the best performing machines available as of now. They have a lot many offerings that conventional inkjet printers cannot provide. Due to a variety of brands, features, and types, it has become quite difficult to choose a good laser printer.
Buying a Laser Printer
Black and White or Color
Owing to your requirements, decide if you want to buy a monochrome printer or a color one. Note that monochrome ones would be most suitable for general home-office use or for a small business. On the other hand, color printers are used for higher printing needs. This is why they are mostly used by advertising, photography, graphic designing, and print media industries. However, when it comes to the cost, color ones are more expensive than their monochrome counterparts.
Memory Capacity
Just like computers, laser printers also have memory storage capacity to aid in tasks. Memory is provided in these printers to store printing commands and files, which consume a large amount of space. Besides, larger RAM capacity also helps in processing speed and quality of images produced. Considering how much you are going to use the printer, decide if you want one with 2 to 4 MB of inbuilt memory or a substantial 16 MB of inbuilt, plus expansion facility up to 640 MB.
Printing Speed
The printing speed matters a lot for business purposes, though it hardly matters if you just want to use it for a small home-office or home use. Note that speed also matters if you are printing black and white or color images. Generally, black and white images take less time to print than colored ones. It is better if you choose a model which has the same speed for both type of images. Color printing speeds of laser printers start from 8 Pages Per Minute (PPM), and even go up to 21 PPM.
Printing Quality
Just as the speed of a laser printer is calculated in PPM, the quality is measured in DPI, that is, dots per inch. DPI means the number of dots the printer can include in an inch of area. Higher the DPI rate, better would be the resolution of the overall print job. Printers manufactured nowadays have a print quality of 600 x 600, which is anyway a minimum requirement for printing documents in the best quality. High performance color printers provide a DPI rate of 2400 x 2400, which is the most appropriate for printing clear photographic images.
Standalone or Combo Printers
Another crucial thing is to decide whether to select a standalone or a combo printer. Standalone ones do the job of only printing, whereas combo machines have facilities for scanning, faxing, copying, and so on. Since most of the printers today come in combo packages and that too at an affordable price, they seem to be a more suitable option. These machines save office space and time, which adds to the convenience.
Printer Brand
There are many brands, which offer a good lineup of laser printers. Some of the most popular ones are Epson, Brother, Xerox, HP, Canon, Lexmark, and Samsung. Every brand has its product offering such as Brother Color Laser MFC from Brother, Phaser and ColorQube from Xerox, the LaserJet series from HP, imageCLASS from Canon, and other series. Note that products from each brand have something to offer in the world of advanced laser printing.
There are many more factors that you need to think of when deciding to purchase a laser printer. Some of the factors include maximum number of pages that can be printed in a month and what all connectivity options are included. Considering the above criteria, you will be able to compare several good models of printers and decide on the best one as per your printing requirements.