Color Laser Printers

Cost per page makes Color Lasers attractive.

One of the things people soon discover about "low cost" color output devices such as color inkjet printers or dye-sublimation printers, is that the cost per page is quite high. Although printer manufacturers have all sorts of euphemistic ways of beating around the bush (the "average page" being one of the most widely abused), the fact remains that the best quality printing on high quality stock from any of today’s color inkjet printers costs about a dollar a page. Dye sublimation printers, which produce virtually dotless printouts on glossy paper, can run over three times that amount. Clearly, department managers and business professionals producing more than a few dozen color pages per month should consider the alternatives carefully.

In terms of cost per page, a color laser printer begins to look a lot more attractive than its $7000-to-$10,000 price tag might initially suggest. Instead of a dollar or more per page, color laser printouts, including consumables, run as low as 10 cents a sheet. Factoring in issues such as the ability to network most color laser printers, and their much higher duty cycles (described below), and the higher up-front cost begins to pay off with every page you and your coworkers print.

Candidate for Color Laser?
If you or your coworkers regularly mail out or otherwise distribute promotional materials, you probably already know the positive psychological effect that color has. Color looks more professional and emphasizes a message in subtle but powerful ways.

Color laser printers are appropriate for "short run" color printing tasks that would be economically unfeasible to produce by standard four-color offset printing.

Most color laser printers are networkable and typically provide compatibility with the Hewlett-Packard PCL (printer control language) standard as well as the PostScript language popular with desktop publishers and graphic artists. However, not all color lasers are equally equipped to handle photographic images and complex documents.

As with other types of office printers, a number of factors must be considered:

• Network options. Most of today’s offices use Ethernet networks to share data. Mac-based offices may use AppleTalk. Most color lasers support one or both of these network connections, and usually provide a local parallel and/or serial interface as well. Network software support is equally important. Although operating systems such as Windows 95 and NT provide basic support for many printers, virtually all models come with enhanced drivers for these and other OSes. For example, the HP Color LaserJet 5M supports EtherTalk/TokenTalk, IBM AIX, IBM LAN Server, Microsoft LAN Manager and the major Microsoft Windows networking platforms.
• Duty Cycle. As with all mechanical devices, there are "light duty" and there are "heavy duty" printers. The actual amount of pages per month the unit is deemed to be capable of handling is expressed, as you might have guessed, by the Duty Cycle. The HP Color LaserJet 5M, for example, is rated as having a 30,000 page per month duty cycle. For comparison, a color ink-jet printer such as the HP DeskJet 692C has a duty cycle of only 1,000 pages per month.
• Resolution. Surprisingly, this is less important than most people think. Although most color lasers are capable of 600-dpi or 600x1200-dpi printing (with some, such as the Tektronix Phasar 550, going as high as 1200x1200 dpi), there are several other factors that come into play. For example, PC Today magazine, in its April 1997 review of the Phasar 550, noted that the unit’s "disappointing print quality is a definite drawback." The article also noted that the Phasar’s cost of consumables was over 1.6 times that of the IBM Network Color Printer, which rated best in consumables cost and color image quality.
• Print Speed. Another area where marketing literature often takes great liberties, with its euphemistic "average" page-per-minute ratings, the upshot is this: even if you print the same text file and the same image to all the printers you are considering, you have to consider that the amount of memory the printer is configured with, whether it has internal hard drive, what type of network connection it is using (and how busy the network is at the time you are printing), etc., etc., all come into play, making comparisons difficult to make and assess. Thus, we’re inclined to recommend looking for comparative reviews in any of the many magazines that run side-by-side evaluations. For example, the above-mentioned PC Today magazine found, in a side-by-side test of comparably priced color lasers from IBM, QMS, Hewlett-Packard and Tektronix, that the HP Color LaserJet 5M had the fastest print times for both text files and PostScript graphics. In practical terms, this translates to about 10 pages per minute for black printing and 2-3 ppm for color.
• Cost of Consumables. Coming full circle to where we started this discussion, this is an important consideration again best accomplished by looking at printer roundups in magazine reviews. For example, PC Today found that the above-mentioned HP Color LaserJet had the second-lowest consumables cost but noted that the IBM printer, which came up with the lowest cost of consumables, also proved to be the most expensive printer surveyed. The IBM, at a unit cost of US$8999, was over 22 percent more expensive than the HP printer (priced at US$7,395 as configured in the PC Today review), yet the IBM unit shipped with only 16MB of RAM, compared to the HP’s standard 36MB. Moreover, the HP unit’s cost per color page comes to about 8 cents (US), while the Tektronix Phasar 550 works out to more than three times that cost per page. Recent price drops from Hewlett Packard and a new 560 model from Tektronix has added a few variables to the mix, so be sure to compare for yourself.

There are other issues you should look into as well, including paper handling (if the printer can handle tabloid paper, you can lay out full-size newspaper spreads or fold and staple letter-size booklets!), expansion options, service, warranty and so on. Especially important is the availability of supplies. The best printer in the world isn’t much good if you can’t get toner refills.

As you can see, there are many factors to be considered. Arm yourself with information and consider your requirements carefully.

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