laser printer vs ink jet printer

I would consider a laser printer to be preferable if you are printing a lot of text, since most of the time laser printers are cheaper per page. On the other hand, I have heard that generally Laser printers are more power hungry during operation than inkjet (someone correct me).

But yes, if you told us what "better" means to you, more people would be able to help you.
 
For printing text/black&white, lasers have much better print speed, print quality and cost per page (usually 1/10th of the cost).

For color presentations, a laser would be better if you are doing high volume, otherwise a cheap inkjet would probably have a lower cost of ownership. (I think you'd need to print more than 5000 pages for a $400 color laser to make sense vs $50 for the injet + $30 ink x 500 pages.)

If you want to do photos, inkjets are the best option, but ink will get expensive fast - printing them at costco will likely be cheaper.

If you don't need to print colour, a budget laser printer can be found for less than $100 and will serve you well.
 
quality of text/graphics. application, printing on normal paper and photo paper used on any inkjet. is it compatible (normal/photo inkjet paper) with laser printer?
 
thanks.

what can people do with laser printers that can't be done with inkjet printers?
 
Depends...

For text - Laser.
For high quality photo's - InkJet (Canon IMHO).

For Text/Newsletters where color graphics and photo's don't have to be high photo quality - Color Laser. You can get a color laser for around $300 these days.

-Larry
 
stopmenow said:
thanks.
what can people do with laser printers that can't be done with inkjet printers?
Lasers print much, much faster. A 100 page report will print in less than 5 minutes on even the cheapest laser, probably half an hour and an ink tank change on an inkjet. The text also looks better on a laser printer (imo) and it won't run or smudge like it can with inkjets.

Color lasers look good for presentations, but not for photos - lasers just don't have the same resolution that inkjets do.

For inkjets, I prefer Epson to Canon for photos, but they're both pretty close. HP's ink is a bit more expensive than Epson/Canon and the print quality isn't quite as good, but they tend to have more user-friendly features like lcd screens for printing straight from a memory card. Stay well, well away from Lexmark and Dell as their ink is the most expensive, cartridges are small and print quality is crap.

For lasers, I have a cheap samsung which is good, but there's no real difference in print quality or print speed between Samsung, Brother or Minolta in the low end. For business class models, I'd only ever recommend HP - they tend to be pricey, but are built to take a beating.
 
thanks all
i was going for colors on a laser printer, but since you guys say it's not that good i'll keep my epson stylus photo r200.
please continue talking about laser printers, it's interesting.
 
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