Pros & Cons of Laser Printers

Video Transcript

"We are talking about the pros and cons of laser printing and laser printers. This should be a really simple subject for anybody interested in laser printing. The pros of laser printing are generally the speed at which you can print documents, typically the quantity is rated in pages per minute and usually with an end user device you'll get about a typically a three to 10 page rating per minute and with laser devices obviously that starts going up with the model and the amount of money that you pour into the device. Usually it's about anywhere from 10 to 30 pages per minute typically. The second is the quality of the print jobs that you will submit to laser printers. They typically come out a little more crisp then say an end user printer. The quantity of pages that can actually be printed typically the shelf life of a laser printer is a lot higher then that of your typical printer that you might have at your home. The network integration, laser printers are phenomenal when it comes to integrating within a corporate environment or even a home network. They're a lot more simple to print to over a network setting. And the efficiency of the machines, they are highly efficient devices to use to print to especially if you're dealing with an HP4100 series laser printers, those are awesome machines. The cons of laser printing are typically just marked down as the cost of ownership and by cost of ownership I mean the initial price to purchase a laser printer, they typically are a lot more expensive than your end user device. The cost of toner cartridges, toner cartridges are not cheap. Typically they will actually cost more than an end user printer will to replace a single toner cartridge then it would be to just go buy a new end user device. The repair and maintenance costs usually if you have a problem that cannot be fixed by an IT person within your office, then you either have to ship it out to get it fixed or bring someone into the office and that obviously starts adding up costs pretty quickly. And finally the replacement cost if you have a laser printer and it breaks, and you have to replace it, obviously you have to pay that sum of money over again in order to replace it. So those are the quick cost of ownership cons and then the last con that I can think of is the management and maintenance tasks. To manage and maintain a laser printer is a lot more difficult at times depending on the complexity of what's going on. You have roller change outs, you have drum replacements, things like that and depending on the model, some of those tasks can get pretty hairy if you don't have a good mechanical mindset of source. So those are the pros and cons of laser printing."