[Macworld]

Post your comments for Macworld Buying Guides: Laser printers here

[ibeetle]

This was a nice tight little article.
Any chance we could get a similar buying guide for Laser printers strictly for the home user; if there is such a thing. Now that prices are coming down (especially this holiday season) Laser printers are looking more and more attractive. Especially when a single ink cart. can cost as much as $25 with some ink jets, a month or two, or worse only a few weeks.
Thanks again for the article.

[kirkmc]

Home laser printers are cheap. Unless you are in business, you don't need to spend that much.
As for printing on both sides to save paper: I save my used paper that's printed on one side and stick it in my printer to print on the other side. I don't need a two-sided printer for that.

[chewygoat]

I'll never buy another inkjet. I've had an old network Laserjet for years now that I picked up used for $60 and it's still plugging away reliably to this day. I've only had to buy toner for it once and the black-and-white print quality is superior to any inkjet I've had. We've got it hooked up to our wireless hub and so can easily print from every computer in the house. Laser printers are much cheaper to operate and they're also more reliable then inkjet printers, or at least my old laserjet sure has been. I would like a color laser printer, though. I would very much like to see a comparison review of inexpensive color laser printers. There are some amazingly inexpensive ones now, and I'd really like to know which, if any, are any good, and how long the toner lasts. I'm not that concerned about print speed. I can wait.

[skipaq]

I have the Brother HL-4070 CDW at home. You can find this color laser printer for about $400. The duplex ability is a great feature that I wouldn't want to give up because I develop and print class materials, bulletins etc. This printer also has wireless capability that is also something that I would miss. The print quality is very good for black or color text. It does well in printing graphics and photos. I use an inkjet for printing on photo paper. While the initial price is a good deal more than an inkjet; a duplexing, wireless color laser printer at this price is a good choice for the home.

[lhudd]

Why in the hell are you reviewing three laser printers priced from $500 to $650? Why not review laser printers in the $100-$300 range (including some color) and then comment about total cost of ownership based on the costs and frequency of toner replacement? If i were buying a laser printer for an "office" purpose, i wouldn't buy these things, i'd go HP all the way. Laserjets are the gold standard for office duty-cycle printing tasks, even if they are the most expensive.

[tbailey]

Try $200 for the Brother HL-4040CN Network Color Laser Printer. Same print engine without the duplex and wireless networking (does have Ethernet to connect to wireless hub). Same great speed, quality and color as big brother 4070. Cartridges are under $50 for 1500-2000 pages.

Here's a link: http://dealmac.com/B...s-h/261875.html

Tom

[musicdude_77]

I guess you guys have a thankless job. Can't keep everybody happy. Anyway, thanks for the great articles. I have a Lexmark C532n (<$450)that works just great and has great reviews. You can buy the duplexer for about $100 more. I've had it for a year in my business and it works great. Color output is superior and prints at about 25 ppm color and B/W. My Print cost is about .07 for B/W and .13 for color. Overall, it's been a great printer.

[Nanosound]

Thanks for the article. I would also love to see a small color laser printer comparison.

[alterbentzion]

We've had a Phaser 6180DN for about two years now, and we've only had one reservation and one real problem.
Reservation: Colors in photos tend to be a bit dark/oversaturated.
Problem: We've had two defective black toner cartridges, which caused the entire print area of a page to look dingy.
In the case of the printing problem, Xerox bent over backwards in a way I can't imagine any other company would. By the time their techies has solved the problem, they had replaced both our fuser and our transfer unit for free, and had sent a technician down two or three times. And we did NOT have any service agreement other than the standard one-year warranty!
BTW, you can save a few dollars per cartridge (and save on shipping, too) by shopping around on-line.

[mattt]

"...they’re also more environmentally friendly."
Care to expand on that? I can see toner cartridges lasting longer/being refilled-->less landfilling. But it's my understanding laser-printed paper is more difficult to recycle due to how the toner fuses to the paper surface. Also, laser printers can produce more toxic fumes in operation than an inkjet.
Some clarification on this point would be good.

[bugsnw]

We use the 6180N at home and at the office. Xerox makes high quality printers that produce great output. I haven't used my inkjet since buying the laser. Prices at costco.com dip into the low $300s, which is amazing considering they ship with toner cartridges (albeit not as high capacity as replacement cartridges).

[rayar8]

I'm a little dumbfounded. In James Galbraith's review of the the OKI C6100dn it was determined by the jury's tests that the printed output quality of the 22MB Photoshop image was of superior quality. The text quality was very good and the graphics, fine lines and gradients were also very good.
Eventually the OKI C6150 came out to replace the C6100 and in Chris Holt's review the jury's tests, this time, determined that the printed image quality of the 22MB Photoshop image was of very good quality. The text quality was superior and the Graphics: Fine lines and gradients were just good. Although, the jury's tests for the C6100 seem to be better: superior, very good and very good vs superior, very good and good for the C6150 they were both given 4.5 mice. In addition to that the C6150 review ends stating that it produces even better color photographic prints than the older C6100. How could that be?, when the C6150 Photoshop image was just very good and the C6100 photoshop image was superior Explain that to me.

[bobvin]

Not a very good article -- you did a poor job of defining the criteria for the review/recommendations. The review was obviously aimed at home use, and you consider text quality and print speed important factors to consider. But there is no consideration of long term cost of ownership, reliability, or consistency of output over time. I learned the hard way these factors matter just a much as text quality, considering most lasers, color included, will printe at least "good" quality text.

I own a small business and regularly produce user manuals for our products. The manuals have a fair amount of color graphics and a few photos. I bought a color laser based on the image quality, but it turned out to be a real pain after only a few thousand pages. The dang thing could not consisently and relaibly produce good color. And, while text quality in black for most lasers is quite good, more importantly would be the ability to print text of mixed colors. When you print text with all four colors, registration better be damn accurate or the text will look blurry.

You also don't mention anything about different sized paper - after my first disaster with a color laser I was very skeptical the technology was advanced enough -- then I bought a Ricoh color laser that can handle double sided tabloid (11 x 17) pages. It cranks out 50 38-page manuals without a hitch, has consistent reliable color, is fast, duplexes faithfully, and has the ability to add a folder and stapler unit. Granted, I'm not talking about a $600 printer.

As for the comments about a color laser matching a color inkjet - yes for basic graphics and charts, but if you want to produce photo quality images inkjet is still the way to go. a color laser won't come close in that quality measure.