Laser Toners - Review
Why pay print shops large amounts of money to print your brochures and reports when you can do it all yourself with a high-speed high-quality colour laser printer? For this review, we look at nine colour laser printers that are capable of printing colour at 25 pages per minute (ppm). Five out of the nine colour printers were only 24ppm capable but we still decided to feature them in the main review. For some of the vendors it was the fastest colour laser printer they make. We invited all the major vendors with Ricoh, Oki, Fuji-Xerox, Kyocera, HP, Epson, Konica-Minolta, Tally Genicom, and Lexmark all submitting. We decided to split the review in two sections one being printers for medium-sized workgroups and the other being for medium-to-large sized workgroups.
There hasn't really been any major development's in the printer world apart from printers getting faster, producing sharper output, and being cheaper to run. With the medium-to-large workgroup printers you can purchase additional paper trays to push your total paper capacity to more than 4000 pages with some printers. Finishers can also be attached to these printers. The type of finishers that can be attached varies between vendors but are not limited to only punchers, staplers, stackers, and booklet finishers. With the small to medium workgroup printers you can typically only add paper trays that can increase your paper capacity to around 2000 pages, you can also add memory and on some you can install a hard disk drive.
Some printers still ship with starter toners, which don't hold as much toner as standard toners. We thought vendors had stopped doing this but we guess they are still trying to save a buck somewhere. Replacing toners is relatively inexpensive but what you should be conscience of is how often you are replacing toner. Of the medium to large workgroup printers black toner would be good for around 20,000 pages while colour 15,000 pages assuming five percent coverage. Black toner usually lasts longer because in most cases it holds more toner. The small to medium workgroup printers are generally good for 9000 pages in black and 6000 in colour. Industry sources found the average colour coverage per page is between 10 and 12 percent and the makeup of these colour pages are five to six percent black (K) and five to six percent colour (CMY). This also took into account all types of users including business and graphic users. The main reason why black usage is so high is because colour printers use black toner to darken colours. This also makes black the highest single consumed colour on a colour page.
To work out the total cost of ownership of a colour printer you should get a vendor to supply you with all the service intervals that would need to be carried out based on the amount of printing you think you're going to be doing. This should include details of toners, drums, fusers, rollers, belts, waste bottles, and any other components that you would have to replace.
There hasn't really been any major development's in the printer world apart from printers getting faster, producing sharper output, and being cheaper to run. With the medium-to-large workgroup printers you can purchase additional paper trays to push your total paper capacity to more than 4000 pages with some printers. Finishers can also be attached to these printers. The type of finishers that can be attached varies between vendors but are not limited to only punchers, staplers, stackers, and booklet finishers. With the small to medium workgroup printers you can typically only add paper trays that can increase your paper capacity to around 2000 pages, you can also add memory and on some you can install a hard disk drive.
Some printers still ship with starter toners, which don't hold as much toner as standard toners. We thought vendors had stopped doing this but we guess they are still trying to save a buck somewhere. Replacing toners is relatively inexpensive but what you should be conscience of is how often you are replacing toner. Of the medium to large workgroup printers black toner would be good for around 20,000 pages while colour 15,000 pages assuming five percent coverage. Black toner usually lasts longer because in most cases it holds more toner. The small to medium workgroup printers are generally good for 9000 pages in black and 6000 in colour. Industry sources found the average colour coverage per page is between 10 and 12 percent and the makeup of these colour pages are five to six percent black (K) and five to six percent colour (CMY). This also took into account all types of users including business and graphic users. The main reason why black usage is so high is because colour printers use black toner to darken colours. This also makes black the highest single consumed colour on a colour page.
To work out the total cost of ownership of a colour printer you should get a vendor to supply you with all the service intervals that would need to be carried out based on the amount of printing you think you're going to be doing. This should include details of toners, drums, fusers, rollers, belts, waste bottles, and any other components that you would have to replace.
posted by Toners at 9:55 PM
<< Home