PC World Business

• Printer consumables
• Printer specifications: Resolution
• How fast is it?
• Duty cycle ratings
• Memory specifications
• Font specifications
• Special media support
• Colour laser printers
• Networking support
• Other considerations: The printer driver
• Is it environmentally friendly?

Cut-throat price competition in the inkjet space and the exorbitant cost of laser colour printers has often kept the latter out of the minds of home and small business users, but this is beginning to change.

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.