Buyer's Guide: Color Laser Printers

If you've decided to buy a color laser printer, you've probably already weighed the benefits of one versus its inkjet or solid-ink counterparts. Inkjets and solid-ink printers, generally, have brighter colors and better resolution, but they're comparatively slow.

For speed, lasers can't be beat, and for most business purposes -- reports, flyers, and PowerPoint slides rather than glossy photos -- their quality is more than adequate. Moreover, they allow you to produce high volumes of color documents at lower cost than inkjet printers.

Lexmark C546dtn

When considering buying a color laser, it's useful to be familiar with some broad categories before digging in to the nitty-gritty.

If speed's your thing, there are high-speed color laser printers. As the category title suggests, machines like the HP Color LaserJet CP4525n and Xerox Phaser 6360dn are built to burn toner, pumping out anywhere from 30 to more than 40 pages per minute (ppm) in color or black and white. Prices in this category range widely, from under $1,000 to almost $3,000.

For all-purpose office uses, there are business color lasers. Printers in this category, such as the Kyocera FS-C5300dn and Konica-Minolta Magicolor 5650dn, are slightly slower than their high-speed cousins -- output is in the 25- to 30-ppm range -- and the price spread is from $500 to $1,500.

Small-business or workgroup color lasers, like the Ricoh SP C311n and Kyocera FS-C5100dn, are very similar to models in the business category. Their page output speeds are in the same ballpark and their pricing is in the $500 to $1,000 range. However, their cost per page for color prints is typically higher than business class printers, usually because they support finer output resolutions.

At the bottom are entry-level or personal color laser printers. Ordinarily, these aren't suitable for business purposes, even if you're the only employee in your firm. Printers in this category are inexpensive to buy -- under $500, for the most part -- but their cost per color page is high (in the 15 cents per sheet range), and they're slow, often with color output of fewer than 10 pages per minute.

Indeed, the low end is your last place to find the four-pass technology used by the first color lasers -- looping each sheet through the printer four times to apply black, cyan, magenta, and yellow toner, so a model capable of 20 ppm in black and white slows to 5 ppm in color. More efficient, single-pass technology has taken over the rest of the market.

Pay As You Go

Your initial outlay for a printer is only the start of your expenses. Once your business starts using the printer, there are costs connected to operating the unit. The primary recurring cost is toner replacement, so you'll want to buy a printer with the best cost-per-page spec that meets your needs.

High-speed color laser printers, for instance, have per-page costs in the range of five to 10 cents for color and one to 1.5 cents for black and white; business printers, 5.5 to 12 cents for color, one to 2.5 cents for black and white; and small-office units, nine to 13 cents for color and 1.5 to three cents for black and white.

Keep in mind that lower-end color laser printers usually have smaller toner cartridges, so they must be changed more often. That will be obvious in the per-page cost for the printer. For example, a single color cartridge for the Oki C6150n, which sells in the $650 to $750 range, can produce 6,000 pages and has a cost of 13.5 cents per color page, while a high-capacity color cartridge for a Xerox Phaser 6360dn, which sells for around $1,500, can produce 12,000 pages at a per color page cost of 9.8 cents.

What's not so obvious is that desktop printers' cartridges typically contain the toner, imaging component and toner waste receptacle in the same unit. That makes them more expensive to buy but easier to replace. In some high-end printers, those components are separated. That reduces the cost of toner cartridges, as well as the total cost of ownership for the unit, but requires some technical skill to maintain.

HP Color LaserJet Enterprise CP4525xh

Once you decide how much you want to spend for your printer, you need to assess how much you'll be using it. Then you need to evaluate the duty cycle of the printer. The duty cycle is the number of sheets that can be printed in a month without doing harm to the printer, according to the manufacturer. As with many numbers emanating from manufacturers, the duty cycle for a printer is often overstated.

A rule of thumb when determining if a duty cycle fits your needs is to take the highest number offered and divide it by two (or, for color sheets from four-pass lasers, four). If the results exceed your expectations for a month, then the printer is a good candidate for purchase. For example, if a printer's duty cycle is 50,000 pages a month and you anticipate printing fewer than 25,000 pages a month, then it should fit into your business nicely. (If it's a four-pass printer, you're OK if you anticipate fewer than 25,000 monochrome or 12,500 color pages per month.)

Time Between Refills

You'll also need to assess how you'll be using your printer. If your print jobs are typically small, then printers with slower speeds -- 20 pages per minute or less -- may meet your needs. You'll also want to check out a printer's first-page-out time -- how long it'll make you wait for the start of a job, or for a one-page letter. And yes, though they're not as infamously exaggerated as inkjet printers' advertised best-case downhill draft speeds, laser manufacturers' print speed specs often reflect ideal conditions. Take them with a grain of salt.

If you're performing small jobs, chances are you won't need large paper capacities, so trays with a standard capacity of 250 sheets may do. If your printing requirements are more robust, you'll want a unit capable of handling longer and more complex print jobs -- something with speeds in the 40-ppm range and larger paper capacities, with standard or optional trays that can hold 2,000 sheets or more. (Remember, too, that stuffing a tray to capacity is more likely to jam the printer than loading paper with a little breathing room.)

Of course, you can get more mileage out of the paper in your trays by printing on both sides of each sheet. That's called duplexing. Some color lasers have duplexers built in; others offer them as an add-on. Having duplex capability is a big plus in a printer. Not only does it save paper on most jobs, but it saves labor costs. Without one, the only way to do a duplex job is to print the odd pages of the document first, then flip and reload the stack and print the even pages. That's a labor-intensive process at best.