Most inkjet cartridges printer sold are targeted for those
interested in laser-printer quality at a cheaper price.
For the cheaper capital investment, the inkjet printer is
much slower. It prints at about 1.5 pages per minute, versus
six pages a minute for most lasers. You must replace the
inkjet cartridge every 500 pages, versus every 3,000 pages
for lasers. The inkjet printer is designed to print about
1,000 pages a month, versus 3,000 pages for the average
laser (over several ink cartrdges).
The popular ink cartridge printer is sold with 128K of
memory and fewer fonts than the laser. Because most lasers
come with 512K minimum, 128K is much smaller. Fewer fonts
can be downloaded.
Inkjet cartridges printer design engineers have two choices
for implementing graphics mode. The first choice is to print
the graphics in band mode (printing a horizontal band of
graphics), like dot-matrix printers. The second choice is
to buffer the whole page and print it all at once like a
laser. Because the inkjet per-forms at dot-matrix-type speeds,
the band technique is more popular.
Most laser printers buffer a whole page in graphics modes.
Although the benefits of whole-page buffering are great
for example, reprinting the page if the paper jams these
benefits also could be implemented in the PC soft-ware.
Currently, however, most printers cannot tell the PC that
the paper has jammed. Thus, printers are responsible for
reprinting after a paper jam. Only laser printers currently
are capable of doing this, because they are the only printers
that can buffer a whole page.
Ink cartridge printers should really be compared to dot-matrix
printers. They should be treated as high-resolution, dot-matrix
printers with more font flexibility. Inkjets printer' big advantage
over dot-matrix printers is the capability to accept downloaded
fonts. There is no reason, however, that 24-pin dot-matrix
printers could not develop this capability. In fact, dot-matrix
printers technically have this capability; they just do
not have the massive quantity of memory required. Furthermore,
if copier machine prices are any indication of the bottom-line
laser-printer prices, there is still room for low-end laser
prices to drop below even that of the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet
Ilp (four pages per minute) street price of $900.
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