Monochrome Laser Printers Compared

20.02.2009
Are you wondering who would want a black-only printer when there are color MFDs available for less than half the cost? These machines are intended to be 'personal' printers, meaning for professionals who work out of their homes or run a small office; and as 'small work group' printers where a team of around 10 members can share such printer for their document printing needs. All these printers are priced below the Rs.10, 000 (US$200) mark (except the HP Laserjet P1505 that carries a tag of Rs.11, 299, but HP has assured us that the model will see a price cut to bring it to Rs.10,000). If your printing need is documents without color, getting a budget laser printer will give you a higher duty cycle (read: more rugged) and lower printing cost as compared to any entry level inkjet. Given the fact that these printers don't cost much, they can serve as a secondary printer to complement a color inkjet / MFD.

We tested each of these printers for quality and speed of printing, tabulated feature sets and weighed it against purchase price as well as cost per print. As we have mentioned earlier, cost of acquisition is only part of the total cost of ownership. Running cost makes up the bulk of the total money spent during the lifetime of the printer. No wonder then, cost per print can make or break a deal for an enterprise or SMB when it comes to adding printers to its IT infrastructure. Especially since the text printing quality is similar across various models as we have seen with this set of seven lasers on test. Two printers each from HP, Canon, Brother and one from Xerox made it to our labs for this shootout.

Performance

No Flaws in Everyday Printing: Laser printers, or for that matter inkjets too, have become sufficiently advanced to an extent that pretty much all of them offer good print quality when it comes to documents (black text printing). From resumes to marketing collateral, these printers do the job, so long as, of course, the print job does not require color. In our text prints we looked for two parameters -- presence jaggy edges (edges showing hints of zig-zag under close scrutiny) and lack of graininess in print. The two 'Brothers', the HL-2140 and the HL-2150N produced the best prints with no jaggy edges and curves looking smooth, even under a magnifying glass.

The dark prints contrasted well against the white of the paper. Text as small as point size 2 was easily readable when viewed under the magnifying glass (note that text of this size cannot be read by the naked eye). The two HPs and the two Canons too produced good prints, just a notch lower than the Brothers. The only printer that failed to produce easily readable print at this size was the Xerox Phaser 3117.

Printing the Occasional Image: These printers are not meant to do images as their primary task. However, slideshows and even Word documents often contain images like graphs or sketches. We printed our grayscale test chart at the best resolution that each of these printers offered to gauge how well these machines can cope with an occasional graphics job. Neither did we expect great prints, nor did we see them. As expected, all these printers fell below the mark in this test, but here's some indication of which of them might reproduce an accompanying image in a document better. The 21 step black to white column containing various shades of grey shows how many shades the printer can reproduce. The two Canons were, err... powerful (pardon the pun), being able to show 18 shades from black to white. The HP Laserjet P1505 and the Xerox Phaser 3117 managed 16 shades. The two Brother printers were a bit disappointing here -- the HL-2140 printed 14 discernable shades and the bigger HL-2150N managed 13.