From Lauren Riebs of lauren.riebs@reviews.com comes this excellent review of laser printers. I have always wanted a laser printer. Compared to inkjet, they produce far cleaner text and a single cartridge lasts a very long time. But, laser cartridges are more expensive to buy in the first place, so you need to have sufficient printing to make the purchase worthwhile.

If you are working on a book and printing out many manuscripts, a laser printer might be exactly what you need, assuming you don’t also need a flatbed scanner and fax machine too. On the other hand, it might be worth buying a laser printer and a separate flat-bed scanner since they no longer cost as much as they did. 

You will find much more information and details on the author’s home site.

Finding the Best Laser Printer for Your Needs

Every small business or home office needs the right tools to succeed, but we’re not all tech experts. If you’re in the market for some new tech tools for your work, Reviews.com puts together extensive, comprehensive guides to all the products you’ll need. The following is their research to find the best laser printers available – and their four top picks.

(Following research originally featured on Reviews.com https://www.reviews.com/laser-printer/)

Research

A laser printer is ideal for a home office or small business looking to print up to a few hundred pages a day. People with only occasional printing needs, like movie tickets or their annual 1040, are better off with an inkjet as they probably won’t see the high use cost benefits of a laser printer. Laser printers are designed to print long documents much faster than their more common inkjet counterparts. For example, a laser printer can print on average 25 pages per minute compared to the average inkjet printer’s 15 pages. Even better, laser printers use toner. Although toner has a higher initial cost than printer ink, it’s cost effective in the long run because the cartridges last a lot longer — on average they’ll print 2,500 pages vs. an ink cartridge’s 200 pages.

Canon Color image CLASS LBP612Cdw

All-in-one printers aren’t really worth it. Multi-functional laser printers, or all-in-ones, include functions like faxing, scanning, and copying, but our experts advised we should steer clear. If one feature breaks down, that could leave you unable to print while waiting for repairs. Harmon says if you need a laser printer for personal work or a small business, “Don’t get an all-in-one printer. Buy a printer that does its job.”

We knew we wanted to provide both a black and white and a color option to meet varying business needs. Color laser printers are more expensive and you’ll also need to buy color toner which will add to maintenance costs. But even starting models have high output and let you add color to simple graphics like a graph or chart. If you simply don’t need color, save yourself some money and go for a black and white. So what’s the best laser printer? The answer comes down to a few key criteria. First, it should be able to produce high-quality documents with precise text and clear graphics. It should also be cost efficient, and setup and maintenance, such as replacing toner and paper, should be quick and painless.

The industry is largely dominated by five big brands: Brother, Canon, Dell, HP, and Samsung. Since specs aren’t always comparable between brands, during our reasearch we compared printers within each brand to find the best quality and price options for a home office or small business. We pored over consumer reviews from retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, and Office Depot, and considered recommendations from sites like CNET and Consumer Reports, to identify printers highly regarded for being reliable and easy to use, and which ones we really ought to miss.

Top Picks

The HP LaserJet Pro M203dw Printer is our pick for the best black and white laser printer because it excels at printing crisp text and sharp lines for graphs and charts. Pretty simple. Outside of wireless connectivity, the printer doesn’t offer any features, but we don’t mind, because using the printer and replacing toner or paper is painless. It’s more expensive than others on the market, coming in at $200, but If you want to quickly print documents with consistent high quality, the HP M203dw is a solid bet.Our pick for best color laser printer is the HP Color LaserJet Pro M252dw. This printer surprised us with its ability to produce vibrant colors, and even high-resolution images, accurately. The color is a bit dark, but with sharp text and clean lines the HP Color LaserJet Pro M252dw outperformed all the other color printers we tested. At $300, it’s not cheap, and it will require additional color toner cartridges. But its crisp results and features like an intuitive touch screen for checking toner levels or calibrating the printer make the HP M252dw a great pick for daily printing needs.

Dell E310dw Multifunction Printer

The Dell E310dw is great for those who want a cheap printer and don’t require perfect prints. At just $80, the Dell E310dw is the cheapest out of all the printers we tested and still prints crisp text without any problems. But, for those who need straight lines for their graphs or charts, the Dell might not be the best choice. It also has a small (32 MB) memory, which means documents of more than 30 pages may need to be printed in two sessions. Even so, it’s a great budget printer for text-based documents.

HP M252dw

 For those who prioritize precise colors above all else, the Canon Color imageCLASS LBP612Cdw produced the most accurate color tones. However, in terms of text and lines the printer was outclassed by the HP M252dw. Curved lines with the Canon were jagged and text wasn’t as detailed. In addition, navigating the Canon’s menu is a bit more difficult because the menu screen is smaller.

If you print a lot of colored graphics, the $250 Canon LBP612CDW is definitely worth a look.

Categories: Guest Blogger, Technology

Tags: guest post, laser printers, printers, Reviews, technology