Networkable laser printers have dropped significantly in price. But it still pays to know what you're after before your organisation goes colour.
Colour laser printers are a smart and affordable way to add high-speed performance printing and high-quality colour printing to your workplace. If you regularly need to produce colour training manuals, brochures, flyers, newsletters, or reports and are quite sick of paying print shops huge amounts of money, then why not consider doing all your colour printing in-house and start saving money? With the units we've tested for this feature, you can do all these sorts of things over the network as well.
Consumables
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colour on the network Introduction |
Some printers come with starter toner cartridges, which don't hold as much toner as do the standard cartridges that you would replace the starter toner with. We don't like the idea of starter toners but one of the reasons manufacturers do it is to reduce the upfront cost. The Epson was the only printer in this review that used starter toner for both black and colour.
Page coverage
Page coverage is an interesting aspect of printing. Industry sources have found that the average colour coverage per page is between 10 and 12 percent and the makeup of these colour pages is 5-6 percent black (K) and 5-6 percent colour (CMY). This also took into account all types of users including business and graphic users.
This is true because colour printers use black toner to darken colours. This also makes black the highest single consumed colour on a colour page.
Duty cycles
Another interesting area of discussion is the way in which manufacturers quote duty cycles for their printers. For example, one of the manufacturers claim their printer has a duty cycle of 85,000 pages per month which is 1,020,000 pages per year. This is quite a lot of pages and we seriously doubt that any of the printers we've received would be able to churn out as many as 85,000 pages per month on a consistent basis. We wouldn't want to destroy a forest to test this aspect but even if they were capable, the printers we looked at wouldn't be the most cost effective printers for that sort of job.
All the big printer manufacturers make large workhorse printers that would be more suitable for printing more than one million pages per year. We suggest you use a more realistic number like 8500 pages per month, or 10 percent of the claimed duty cycle. This will give you a better idea on whether this printer is suitable and whether it will comfortably be able to handle your print volumes.
Features
None of the printers we received shipped with a hard disk but they can be fitted to most of the printers as an option. If you do fit a hard disk to your printer you can expect to speed up the print process because the printer doesn't need to wait for data from the network to start processing the print job.
All the printers we received shipped with a 10/100 internal Ethernet card, which will enable you to connect your printer via TCP, IPX/ SPX, NetBEUI, EtherTalk, NDS Support, IPP, and SNMP. You will also find most printers fitted with a bi-directional parallel port as well.
Paper handling
Additional paper trays and output bins as well as duplexers are some of the paper handling accessories you can buy for printers. Some printers come with a multi-purpose tray as standard, which is an added bonus. You will find all printers support A4, A5, A6, B5, Letter, Legal, and Executive paper sizes and COM-9, COM-10, C4, and C5 envelopes.
We didn't receive any laser printers that were capable of printing in A3. The Canon N2000 inkjet was, however, able to print in A3+. The Fuji-Xerox on the other hand was able to print posters.
It worth knowing that the type of paper you use will also affect how long certain components in your printer last. If you use coarse or recycled paper then chances are the drum will not last as long.
Speed and output quality
A typical laser printer can only print colour pages at a quarter the rate of a black-and-white printer. This is because there has to be four passes, one for each colour, to create the image. Despite that fact, the print speeds available now are suitable for large workgroups (5 to 16ppm for colour).
Today, most colour laser printers are capable of delivering resolutions of 600 x 600dpi. Of the printers we received, most were able to print at 2400dpi by means of interpolation.
Button layout/control panel
Control panels tend to have only a handful of buttons. The layout usually consists of arrow keys that let you scroll through the various printer settings. From the printer you can set the print quality, interface, and emulation that you want to use as well as set which paper tray you want to be the default. You will also find a small LCD on all colour laser printersâ€"usually one or two lines. The HP instead has great big four-line graphical control panel. Some of the information the HP displays includes the status of the toner, paper levels, paper jam locations, and the status of current jobs.
software
All the printers we looked at shipped with PCL and Postscript drivers. Updates are usually found on the vendors respective Web sites. Some printers ship with their very own proprietary software (HP Web JetAdmin, for example), which allows clients and administrators to view the status of the device as well as being able to adjust the settings. Software is also available that enables users to check the status or set some of the properties of the printer via the Internet. Using a Web browser we can see an exact copy of the printer's control panel, and can navigate through the menu as if we were standing over the printer. This will not only give administrators more control but it will save them time as well. There is also software that can e-mail the administrator when the printer is out of paper or toner, or when an error occurs. What's also great to know is that almost all Windows operating systems are now catered for as well as Mac and Linux operating systems.
Total cost of ownership
To work out the total cost of owning a colour printer we asked each of the vendors to supply us with all the service intervals that would need to be carried out if we were to print 90,000 pages over three years. This included details of how much it would cost and when users would be required to replace toners, drums, fusers, rollers, belts, waste bottles, and any other components that would require service during this time.
Going back almost a year ago manufacturers were claiming that the cost per page for a typical colour page is 20 cents. This is based on 15 percent coverage, which is the industry standard used by many manufacturers. On the other hand printing a typical black page costs about two cents per page at five percent coverage. Today manufacturers are claiming the cost of a typical colour page is 15 cents at 15 percent coverage and the typical cost of printing a black page at 5 percent coverage is less than two cents. It is quite obvious from these figures that colour laser printers don't cost as much to run as they used to.
In this roundup we evaluated five colour laser printers from the leading manufacturers. You can shortlist your choices by looking at the feature tables, which provides information such as the number of pages per minute the unit is capable of producing. For this roundup we were particularly focused on the total cost of ownership of these printers (as well as their print quality).
Speed and output quality
The process of matching the printer output to what you see on your computer monitor is very difficult. One of the reasons is that your computer monitor displays colours using an RGB colour process while printers use a CMYK colour process. There are many other influences that may affect the outputâ€"for example, the type of toner (or ink) that is used as well as printing process (laser or inkjet). Software applications and drivers can also affect results.
One of the ways you can improve colour matching is by using the Pantone Matching system. Some manufacturers provide details on how to use the Pantone system with your printer. It's basically a colour reference manual that display colours, with precise printing formulas for achieving these colours using your specific printer.
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