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You are here: Before you buy a laser printer - Color laser Printers
Color
Laser Printers
Laser printers are now considered to be the standard for the busy working environment. But if you are planning to put your pictures or documents into color, a Color laser printer will please you at the process. Whether it is for your personal or business needs, we would like to arm you with all the information you'll need to help you decide on the right Color Laser printer.
Higher speed, lower prices and high quality color printing performance are making color laser printers one of the fastest-growing categories in the printer market.
Why should you choose the color laser option?
All buying choices flow from the decision whether the laser should be simply from the world of black & white or the much more persuasive but more expensive color alternative.
Color Laser printer quality gives your business documents the professional edge so why limit the effect to black and white? With these top color laser printers you'll be able to produce sharp, colorful brochures, diagrams, stationery, business cards and invoices in house ,at an affordable price. And most of these color laser printers include features that you'd only expect to find in more expensive models.
Laser printers, just as their Inkjet counterparts also offer the option to print color documents and photos. As I remember, a few years ago the cost of laser color printers were pretty prohibitive and out of reach of most home and small business users. But in recent years, the need for color printouts have highly increased and printer manufacturers are under extraordinary pressure to cut costs in an effort to make even high end color laser printers more affordable. It represents a wide array of new challenges and opportunities for printer manufacturers and the price breaks are good news if you're seeking a laser printer that can expand along with your budget or the company's growth.
While overall output printing quality is on the rise, and speed is becoming faster, paper capacities and resolution are higher, the price of color laser printers continues to decline.
Close enough to the price of the quality ink-jet printers, to make many people seriously consider the laser alternative for the first time.You can find several models on the market for less than $1,000, so you can buy a color Laser even for your home business or personal use without paying a hefty price.
Color images are more attractive to the eye, more memorable, and more effective in generating responses. The Internet is overflowing with digital color images and documents that create the poverty of attention. Effective use of color can help express your ideas more easily, communicate your message more efficiently or make your presentations more eye-catching. Color laser printers can present natural-looking textures and vivid colors for long lasting photographs and graphics, which make color-lasers a perfect fit for small offices or middle sized businesses.
Color laser printers offer high-quality print and razor-sharp text, using almost the same procedure as a photocopier to create a printed page. The process to create a printed image or document is similar to monochrome printers, but while the standard monochrome laser printers use a single toner, color laser printers use four toners to print in full color.
Color laser printers are still more expensive than inkjets are but if you plan to print out a large number of colorful pages, this type of printer would be the wiser choice.
While pages printed on a color inkjet printer costs between 14 and 16 cents per page, color laser printers can usually deliver the same color printouts between 7 and 11 cents per page.
Some of the high-end printers have numerous paper feeding trays so you can use and print multiple-sized papers. A color laser printer can store from 150 sheets in a solo tray and up to 1800 sheets with multiple trays. You can adjust the trays to varying widths for convenient paper handling. Try to choose a color laser printer that has at least 250 pages of input capacity and able to work with a variety of paper types.
The automatic paper feeder is a nice feature that can make your life with a printer easier. It automatically loads multi-page documents and moves it through the printer allowing hands-free printing. And an optional, high-capacity lower paper tray assembly is perfect when you need to switch media - letterhead, transparencies, whatever you want.
The newest models are network-ready for group sharing. Another feature on most new models is compatibility with Macintosh, PC and Unix operating systems.
Standby mode: This energy-saving feature lets you leave your printer turned on, and, if it's not being used, it will "sleep" until you need it, then power up when you click on the print command. The standby mode is useful for network printing; the machine can print documents at the command of someone in the next room or even in another country whose daytime may be your nighttime.
Multifunction color laser printers are packed with features, too, but they're often slower than their stand-alone competition.
Color printing requires more time with documents because it has to lay down each color (cyan, yellow magenta, and black) in separate passes, but new color laser models (in-line printers) are able to make it in only one single pass and can achieve higher speed and crisp quality.
Color
lasers also use toner cartridges
for printing, which might cost from $200
to $300 each. Although it seems to be
a high price for a single cartridge but
you will be able to print more pages (above
3000) from a single laser toner cartridge,
so the cost per page is much less than from
ink-jet cartridges in the long term.
Costs per page: Printing in several colors costs more than printing in black and white. It's difficult to gauge costs per page because you must take into account color density, number of colors used and paper size. However, a black-and-white page on the Xerox XPrint costs approximately 13 cents to print; a color page 32 cents; and a color transparency about 91 cents.
The familiar and useful LCD panel on color laser printers may contain a numeric keypad for dialing, will show you text messages, and allows you to scroll through configuration menus and modify preferences without using the driver software.
When your office demands more from a printer than simple black & white printouts, besides high-output color printing, the color laser printer can provide additional flexibility, economical document production solution, and a strategic advantage for your business.
1) Konica Minolta magicolor 2300 DL Color Laser Printer
Color laser printers that are network ready and offer options such as duplexing are rare at this price. The Minolta 2300 DL prints at 16 ppm in black and white and 4 ppm in color and handles a wide variety of media. It also boasts a 2400 dpi resolution for sharp images and automatic color correction. Add the fact that this color laser printer is small enough to fit on a desktop, and you can see why this is the top pick.
2) Samsung CLP-500 Color Laser Printer
It doesn't come network ready, but this color laser printer still has a lot going for it, such as relatively good speed (20 ppm in black and white and 5 ppm in color), excellent print quality, built in duplexing for two-sided copying, and both Parallel and Hi-Speed USB connectivity. And it's comparatively quiet; according to the manufacturer, the CLP-500 series offers the lowest noise level in its class.
3) Okidata C5150n Color Laser Printer
What you will like about this color laser printer is its print quality and speed (the first page is out in 9 seconds in black and white and it prints black and white at 20 ppm and color at 12 ppm). Okidata's C5150n comes network ready and speed is important if you plan to share a printer over a network. Speed costs, however, and you'll find this color laser printer is a more expensive option than the two listed above. Duplex printing is optional.
4) Lexmark C510 Color Laser Printer
Designed for small workgroup use, and featuring 2400 Image Quality printing, this color laser printer has plenty of features to simplify your small business printing needs, from fast printing (13 seconds to the first black and white page; 30 ppm black and white and 8 ppm color) through excellent paper capacity (a 250-Sheet Input Tray is standard). Options include networking and duplexing.
5) Hewlett Packard LaserJet 2550L Color Laser Printer
It does put out the first black and white page in 18 seconds, and has a print speed of up to 20 ppm black and white and 4 ppm color. On the downside, there's no built-in networking (it has both Parallel and Hi-Speed USB connectivity) and the paper capacity options are limited. If these things are unimportant to you, this color laser printer will do the job.
Next Page:
Learn about network laser printers
Previous Page: Learn the benefits of Monochrome Laser Printers
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