Laser Surgery

Entrepreneur, Oct, 2000 by Amanda C. Kooser

With a few nips and tucks in the price, today's laser printers are better than ever.

The so-called paperless office is a myth. If you have an office, you have a printer--and you probably even have a few stacks of paper in the closet. The type of printer you run that paper through is up to you. Inkjets are quite tempting, and they work well in certain situations. They represent a very cheap initial investment, can turn out professional-looking digital photos and bring color to your print jobs. But the reality is, 85 percent of all business printing is in black-and-white only. Try to run off a high-volume printing job or two, and you'll see that $30 ink cartridge refills add up to a budget bust.

When it gets right down to it, nothing takes the place of a good laser printer in your office. Although you can easily pay just as much for a laser printer as you would for a fully loaded desktop PC and accompanying monitor, you don't have to. There are a wide variety of laser printers just right for your budget--the sampling of models included in this column cost less than $600; most cost less than $400.

WHY A LASER?

What does spending less than $600 on a laser printer buy you? Not a color one, that's for sure--you'll have to keep an inkjet handy for any color printing. "Cheap" color lasers start in the $1,000 range. If you do a lot of graphics printing, which requires clean, fast color, then you might want to go ahead and make the investment. For regular office output, however, a monochrome printer makes the most budget sense.

Networking isn't high on the feature lists for these machines, either. For instance, the NEC SuperScript 870 and Xerox DocuPrint P1202 offer optional networking add-ons, but the prices can be high--$249 (street) for the NEC 10/100 network interface card and $220 (street) for the Xerox external Ethernet adaptor. The cost may be worth it if you already have an office network but still need to keep your various laser expenses relatively low. Keep in mind these printers aren't designed for the high-volume duty cycles of most of the network-ready lasers. What you'll get is fast grayscale printing with higher capacity and cheaper upkeep costs than an inkjet.

THE BASICS

Picking the right printer comes down to determining which features fit your needs. The most important things to look for are duty cycles, resolution, memory, paper capacity, speed and compatibility.

Checking a printer's duty cycle is kind of like leasing a car: You wouldn't lease a car with a contract saying you can only drive 10,000 miles per year when you know you're going to drive at least 15,000. You shouldn't buy a printer with a 6,000-page duty cycle if you know you're going to print at least 12,000 per month. Good news: Most small offices won't be in any danger of wearing out the lasers we looked at.

For example, the Lexmark Optra E312 has a listed 10,000-page duty cycle. That comes to approximately 330 pages per day. Your office would have to print long and hard to exceed that amount.

"Laser resolution" has long been what inkjets have aspired to. At 600 x 600 dpi, you can expect crisp text and capable handling of graphics. A number of the machines we looked at topped the typical 600 x 600.

The Brother HL-1250, for instance, touts a 1,200 x 600 dpi graphics resolution. If you plan on printing a significant amount of black-and-white graphics, that extra resolution might come in handy. Always try to see a printer's output before buying, though. Local computer stores should offer you the opportunity to print a test page.

As far as memory goes, if you're used to inkjets, then you're not used to considering how much your printer has. As with a desktop computer, more memory can improve a printer's handling of large files. Printers in this price range usually come standard with either 2MB or 4MB. For instance, the NEC SuperScript 870 comes with 2MB (expandable to 16MB), while the Samsung QwikLaser 6100 includes 4MB (upgradeable to 68MB). For memos and letters, your new printer's standard memory will get the job done. For more intensive applications, like graphics-heavy reports and large Photo Shop files, upgrading will pay for itself with vastly improved image handling.

Paper capacity is probably pretty far down on your list of things to look for in a new laser printer. Most printers, including the Brother HL-1250 and OKI OkiPage 10EX, sport a 250-sheet input tray. That capacity keeps the hassle of reloading to a minimum. The low-cost NEC 870 comes with a 150-sheet input tray.

So, what about speed? Nobody likes twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the printer to get on with it. One spec to look at is speed to print the first page; the other is pages per minute (ppm). The fastest printers in the chart, including the Xerox P1202 and Samsung QwikLaser 6100, clock in at a maximum 12 ppm. The slowest, like the NEC 870, still have relatively decent speeds of 8 ppm. The Lexmark Optra E312 features a fast 15 seconds to-first-print speed. (That's the amount of time--under the most favorable circumstances--the printer takes to start printing.) The OKI OkiPage 10EX takes 12 seconds to print the first page.