Laser Printer Group Test

Laser printers are still the mainstay of office printing and a good few are based in homes and home-offices too. It's easy to see why, as their combination of speed and high image quality makes them ideal for day-to-day printed communications.

Laser printers come in all shapes and sizes from the strictly personal, one-per-desk unit costing around £100, to a full departmental printer with all the sorters, collators and bins an enterprise needs, which can stretch into many thousands of pounds. This targets laser printers in the entry level small-office market, all priced under £300. All these units are intended for individuals or small workgroups.

Most are intended for local connection, but some include or have optional network interfaces so they can be shared between several people. Some have duplexers fitted to allow printing on both sides of the paper in one operation, and most have the option for extra paper trays.

Having two paper trays on a printer not only increases the time it can go without refilling, but also offers the opportunity for different paper types, perhaps plain paper in one tray and letterheads in another.

Why go laser?

So, what are the advantages of a personal or small workgroup laser printer over its ink-jet cousin? There are several obvious ones and a couple of others which you may not have considered. Laser printers are considerably cheaper to run, with typical page costs of two or three pence. By comparison, inkjet print costs, even without colour, will typically set you back two to three times as much.

Laser prints are also considerably quicker than inkjets. Even with recent improvements in inkjet print speed, using longer heads to print a wider swathe across the page, the laser printer’s key advantage is that it prints a page at a time, rather than a strip. All the printers in this review can get close to 20 pages per minute.

Laser printers need less attention, with toner lasting for between 2,500 and 7,500 pages and drums typically from 20,000 pages to the lifetime of the printer. In a busy environment this lack of hassle can be a big bonus.

Less obvious advantages include light and water fastness. Laser print toner is sealed into the nap of the paper using heat and pressure, while some inkjets still use dye-based inks, which smear when wet and fade in strong sunlight. Although inkjet technology is advancing to remove both these shortcomings, laser print is still currently the more permanent of the two printing methods.

There's no reason, of course, apart from cost, why you shouldn't have both a laser printer and in inkjet in your office. The laser printer can take the bulk of the everyday jobs, producing fast and clean, black on white documents. The inkjet comes into its own where colour is essential, as it’s still considerably cheaper to buy a colour inkjet than a colour laser.

So here are eight small workgroup laser printers from all the major printer manufacturers. We ran them through our rigorous suite of bench tests and came up with winners based on feature sets, performance and running costs.

How Laser Printer Works

Laser and LED printers use a fairly simple principle to produce printed pages. They all involve a drum coated in a photo-conductive medium – which can be charged up to a high electrostatic voltage – a source of intense light and a heater to fuse the toner to the paper.

When you print a page on either of these types of printer, the page image is built up within the printer’s memory. At the same time the printer's drum rotates and is charged up. The laser beam or array of high-intensity LEDs then plays on the charged drum and because of its photo-conductive nature, the charge is removed wherever the light touches it.

The toner, a very fine powder, where each particle is made up of plastic and black pigment (three primary colour pigments for colour lasers) is attracted to the areas of the drum which still retain their electrostatic charge. This coats the drum with an image of the page being printed.

The paper is then fed through very close to the drum and itself receives a high electrostatic charge, higher than that on the drum. The toner transfers from the drum to the paper, reproducing the image where it’s wanted. At the moment, though, the toner is just sitting on the paper – you may have experienced this if you've had to clear a paper jam and you find the toner comes off on your fingers. The page hasn't yet been through the fuser.

The fuser briefly heats the toner and paper to a high temperature. It's long enough to melt the plastic toner, so it bonds with the nap of the paper. This is why pages coming straight out of a laser printer are warm to the touch.

The final stage in the process is to clean the excess toner from the drum so that the whole process can repeat. Modern laser printers don't have drums big enough to hold an entire page image, so they build up sections of the image continuously, as the drum rotates. Laser printers have fast microprocessors inside to handle the data transfer and page creation which has to be very quick when they’re printing at up to 20 pages per minute.

LED printers, pioneered by OKI, use a long strip array of high-intensity LEDs to replace the laser beam. The array has the same function in the print process in reducing the static charge on the drum in areas where the final image requires no toner. While the mechanics of an LED printer are much simpler than for a laser, which requires mirrors to direct the light across the drum, the potential for an individual element to fail in an array which has 600 LEDs per inch is that much greater.

Like all good technologies, laser and LED printers have been refined over the years, so the engines they use can be made cheaply, while still increasing their resolution and the quality of the printed images they produce.

How We Tested

There are three things we want to find out when comparing laser printers: how fast they print, how good their printed output is and how much it costs to run them. We have specific tests or calculations to answer each of these.

We run three different print tests to determine a printer’s speed. The first is the 20 page text document, using a variety of different font sizes, typical of an office report or quotation, but without graphics or photo images. We run the test twice, using the same sheets on the second run and printing on their backs. This has a subsidiary function of testing the printer's ability to print on both sides of the paper (manual duplex), without paper jams.

The second test is a five-page document comprising both text and an organisation chart. This shows how quickly the printer and its driver can rasterise graphical images and tests the reproduction quality of several degrees of tint.

Finally we print a five by three inch photo image to see how well the printers reproduce greyscale images.

Image quality tests are subjective, using a small panel of viewers from a variety of backgrounds. They assess the clarity and density of printed text and the regularity of fill patterns and tints. With photographic material, they look for definition and natural reproduction.

Printing costs are calculated as the price of the toner cartridge divided by the number of pages it can reproduce at five per cent cover. If the drum unit in the printer is sold separately from the toner, this is factored in over its lifetime in the same way as the toner. Finally a cost of 0.6p is added for paper.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is calculated as the cost of the printer itself, plus consumables sufficient to print 30,000 pages. Maintenance costs are not included.

Print Samples

Brother HL-5150D

Brother’s print sample was judged best on text and graphics, with a smooth tint in the organisation chart and clean, well-differentiated black text.

Canon Laser Shot LBP3200

Canon came third on the text and graphics test, where although it produced smooth greyscale tints, the greys were over-light and text was a little thin.

Epson EPL-6200

The Epson produced poor print samples, with heavy graining on the tints and too little variation between different shades. Text print was fair, though.

HP LaserJet 1300

Judged to be in the middle of the field, the HP printed tints were a little blotchy and text printed within graphics was light enough to get lost on its background.

Kyocera FS-1020D

Second overall, the Kyocera still showed some banding in areas of greyscale tint. Text quality was clean and dense with well-shaped characters.

Lexmark E323

Lexmark’s print sample was fair, though there was noticeable banding in the tints, again. Text quality was above average and easy to read.

OKI B4200

Proving that LED technology can match the laser print, OKI’s print samples were a little light on text and showed some banding in tints.

Samsung ML-1750

The tints in the Samsung print sample were too dark and banded, though the text print was crisp, dense and well-formed.

Conclusion

Even though the price range of these printers is in a fairly narrow band, there's a wide range of feature sets and performance within the group. You'll know the kind of features you want from your printer, but things like two-sided printing and extra paper trays and letterheads are typical options.

At the lower end, machines like the Samsung ML-1750 and the Canon LBP3200 are aimed at the one-per-desk, personal printer market, where style is as important as function. Both machines look good and both can do a reasonable job at printing text and graphics. Neither of the printers, though, has much in the way of expansion and the Canon in particular is expensive to run – the only machine to break the £1,000 barrier in our TCO calculation.

OKI and Lexmark each attracted pros and cons to their entrants. OKI’s running costs were comparatively good and it printed quickly, but its feature set was undistinguished and the 2,500 page toner cartridge needs frequent replacement. Lexmark, another longstanding champion of the laser printer, produced a unit with a long warm-up time, medium to high running costs and a propensity to paper jams on duplex printing. In its favour, print quality is better than average and in its all-black livery, it looks good.

HP used to be the king of laser printers, but there's nothing to particularly recommend the LaserJet 1300 over its competitors. While it did a competent job of printing all our test samples and our assessors ranked it up with the Brother in print quality, it's not particularly cheap to run, thanks to the comparatively low capacity of its toner cartridge.

The most expensive printer in the group, Epson's EPL-6200, gave the worst print quality, with our judges placing its samples last in text, graphics and photo print categories. It's not particularly quick and lies in the middle of the pack on running costs, so it's hard to recommend.

The Brother was second only to the Kyocera overall.

Brother’s HL-5150D gave the whole group a good run for its money on features, with its integral duplexer, capacious multi-purpose tray and good expansion options. It’s also good on cost of ownership, and has one of the highest output resolutions in the group – though the greyscale test print came out rather dark. The Brother did do enough however to grab a Recommended award.

Kyocera's combination of value and quality wins it the Editor's Choice

This just leaves the Kyocera, which is hard to fault in any category, except perhaps style. The FS-1020D is quick and can print double-sided with its built-in duplexer. It’s expandable with extra paper trays and came top in our blind print quality assessment. And then you take into account its running costs…

Kyocera has long banged on about the low cost of ownership of its printers, thanks to its lifetime drum, which never needs replacement. Page cost and total cost of ownership figures support this, with the lowest TCO figure in the group by over 20 per cent. It's not usual to have such a clear-cut winner, but in this case the FS-1020D we’ve got just that.