Buying a Laser Printer
You will have to spend more for a printer with the build quality and speed to cope with a heavy workload. Heavy users or small workgroups need up to 25 pages per minute (ppm), and whole departments need more. Bulk printing demands costs 1p per page or less.
Four-pass colour lasers are available for around £130. They are cheaper, but much slower to print colour than a singlepass model. Fortunately even some of the most economical printers are now single pass.
Support for a printer language ControlLanguage (PCL) 6 or PostScript 3 means you can use the printer with any computer and even some PDAs.
Not all laser print graphics well, but a 1,200dpi resolution helps. Colour lasers can often print high quality graphics, but should have at least 32MB of memory.
A network adaptor allows you to connect a printer to an Ethernet network, so all the network users can print to it directly. Smaller groups can use a PC to host and share any printer using Windows’ File and Print Sharing Wizard.
Duplex printing is an increasingly affordable option and lets you print on both sides of a sheet of paper automatically. A scanner/fax unit turns your printer into a multifunction peripheral. Large groups should get multiple paper trays to deal with headed paper and other stationery.
