Many years ago, the offices of the world used dot matrix printers. These simple, reliable printers used little ink, and could produce thousands of copies with little fuss. They did have their limitations though. Because they printed using lots of dots, the final product looked, well, like a lot of dots.
This effect was fine for text, but graphics were impossible, and the text didn't really stand out.
Enter Laser printers.
As an amusing aside, the ability to say that you have your own portable laser is worth the price of admission. These laser printers have all the advantages of the dot matrix printer. They are cheap to run, costing a fraction of a penny per copy, can do text, graphics, images, print quickly, and are normally very reliable.
At the moment the main competition to laser printers is the inkjet printer. Where a laser printer fires awesome lasers at toner to burn it on to the paper, inkjets use something akin to a really advanced quill pen to scribe the document on to the page.
While both printers have their advantages, this article is about how laser printers are better than inkjets, so lets rubbish the competition.
Inkjets have a few problems. Firstly, because of the nature of their printing source - the ink - this has a tendency to dry up if not used. If you only print an email every couple of weeks, the chances of this working properly are slim as you will soon find that the ink has run dry. Inkjets also have the problem of requiring new ink cartridges more frequently than the average laser printer, which means more hassle, having to re-align the printer heads, wasting ink on charging the printer head, plus stress and confusion caused by changing the cartridges. The cost per page for an inkjet printer is quite high, meaning for bulk, medium quality prints, such as printing for reference, records, or most office printing, it simply isnt worth it.
As far as your average laser printer goes, it thinks nothing of printing a couple of hundred copies at a time, some even have built in duplex units to do both sides at the same time. Your stack of copies will all be sharply defined, printed according to your document, and nice and warm to the touch.
Laser printers can sit in the corner of the room to be called upon to print whatever you want without complaining, without the toner drying up, with the minimum of clogging issues, alignment problems, and frequent changes of toner. A laser printer is ideal for the office, and for medium to heavy home use. |
