PC laser printers first appeared in 1984. The HP LaserJet
was an incredible leap forward in technology that directly
competed with the expensive and fast daisywheel printers
of that era. This web section primarily reviews character
laser printers and similar features of object or PostScript
laser printers. But, PostScript printers are so different
that a separate web section is devoted to their software.
The fact that laser printer manufacturers advertise the
life span of their printers in pages reflects their photocopier
origins. This statistic is useful for seeing a major difference
between laser printers. Lasers have a life span ranging
from 160,000 pages to 600,000 pages. Dot-matrix printers,
on the other hand, have a life span of around 30,000 pages.
Inkjet printers print perhaps 100,000 pages. Generally,
the more expensive laser printers last longer (you get what
you pay for).
How many pages a printer can print in a row without its
motors heating up is unimportant. As explained, a typical
laser printer's duty cycle is 3,000 pages per month. Assuming
normal business hours, printing continuously, you would
have to average more than 1/3 page per minute to exceed
the duty cycle. So, if a printer can print 12 pages per
minute, printing at this speed continuously could start
overheating the motors, depending on how cold the room is
and how long the printer prints. Usually, the time needed
to refill a paper tray is all the time that motors need
to rest.
All laser and inkjet printers print at 300 dpi. This resolution
may increase someday, but it is good enough for most purposes.
For better quality, you need a professional typesetter.
The cheaper laser printers come with only 128K of memory.
Most laser printers are starting to come with the 1.5M of
RAM necessary to print a full 8 1/2-by-11-inch page at 300
dpi.
In addition, there is the issue of how much memory you
can eventually add to the laser printer. There is a tremendous
incentive to add memory so that you can use better looking
or personalized fonts. Some printers allow up to 12M to
be added. Others only allow 1.5M.
Laser printers differ tremendously in the number and type
of fonts they come with. Some fonts are worthless. Some
laser printers count one font many times because their software
can manipulate that font in different ways. Some printers
that come with 65 fonts indeed have 65 fonts, but they are
tiny ones that don't take up much memory in the printer.
Ask for a sample printout of all the different fonts the
printer can produce and then make a decision based on the
printout.
Many printer manufacturers are interested in copy protecting
their fonts through encryption software built into the printer.
Like copy-protected soft-ware, this encryption is frustrating.
First, the protection limits the number of companies that
can supply additional fonts to the printer. Second, the
protection limits the capability to create screen fonts
from the fonts in the printer.
Object laser printers are starting to develop scalable
fonts, which have traditionally been a major selling feature
of object printers. This may be a step toward evolving all
character printers into object printers. PC operating systems
are evolving from character video screens to graphic video
screens. This change means that the graphic modes of printers
are used more frequently.
Graphics-mode screens will continue to work, but the new
high-resolution monitors are going to draw graphic-mode
screens so slowly that object videoboards are the next obvious
step. Because the IBM PC world has always kept videoboard
processors, ROM, and memory separate from the mother-board
circuitry, PCs should have faster videoboards than Mac.
The Mac still uses system memory for video purposes.
Printer cartridges contain additional fonts in ROM chips.
These fonts have the advantage of not needing to be downloaded
from the PC. From the manufacturer's point of view, they
have the advantage of being considered a hardware add-on
that you can purchase from only one source. Only popular
laser printers have had cartridges developed by other vendors
so that price competition exists.
Laser printers have their speed measured in pages per minute.
A conversion formula from pages per minute to characters
per second is developed in the "Testing for Speed"
web section of this web section. Most laser printers operate
at around 7.5 pages per minute. The slowest models are around
4.5 pages per minute, and the super fast ones are around
10.5 pages per minute. Again, these speeds don't mean much
unless the printer is in character mode
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