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They heat the ink to boiling and spray it onto the paper through either 64 or tiny nozzles. The printed page may be wet immediately after printing. Laser printers use a photosensitive drum upon which they deposit dry toner. The drum is ionized to replicate the images to be printed. Color laser printers have one toner cartridge for black and separate cartridges for cyan, magenta and yellow. Fused toner images are dry when they come out of the printer.
Laser printers are faster than inkjets. The nature of liquid ink means that those mixtures are easier to reproduce on an inkjet rather than on a laser printer. Laser printers are not always built to handle photo printing, relying instead on halftone dots to create certain colors on documents.
Even those laser printers that can handle the higher-quality color for photo printing require specialized laser-printer-ready photo paper to do it, making it much less convenient than using standard photo paper on an inkjet. However, laser printers tend to be better suited to printing text, offering crisp, clear letter forms that can't be matched by most inkjets. Inkjet printing will often bleed slightly, and while print is legible, the individual letters won't be as sharp in their detail when examined closely.
Ink also has a tendency to smear, and since inkjet prints continue drying after printing, the possibility of smudged documents is a problem that inkjet users need to anticipate. Since laser printers use a heat-transfer method, the print is set and smudge-proof the moment it comes out of the printer.
Takeaway: Laser printers are better for text documents, especially at high volumes, but inkjets have an edge when it comes to printing photos. Another major difference is the cost of ink and toner. Liquid printer ink has been identified as one of the most expensive liquids on the planet, and is a highly engineered product. Designed to provide precise flow rates, to mix and bleed with predictable consistency and to dry within moments, all while providing colors that look just right — there's a lot involved in printer ink.
Because it provides a high-margin product that printer owners will have to buy again and again only encourages printer companies to keep you coming back for more. Inkjet printers vary in the cost-per-page, but tend to fall within the same general range. Black-and-white text will usually run at cents per page, and color printing will run between 15 and 25 cents per page.
A new trend in inkjet printing takes aim at ink costs by replacing expensive plastic cartridges with refillable tanks and inexpensive bottles of ink. The result is dropping printing costs down to less than a cent per page, as seen with the Canon Pixma G MegaTank winner of our Tom's Guide Award for working from home.
It may cost a little more to buy than most inexpensive inkjets, but at just 0. Toner, on the other hand, tends to be less expensive on a per-page basis for laser printers. Though no less carefully made, the fact that toner comes in powder form makes it a much simpler substance to ship, store and use. While individual toner cartridges are more expensive than ink cartridges, they print hundreds of pages, far exceeding the print yields offered on inkjet printers.
As a result, plain-text printing costs dip below the 5-cent per-page mark, and color printing sits right around 15 cents. Jump to a high-capacity cartridge, and that cost drops to 2.
Toner also stores better over the long term. Ink cartridges can be stored for months if kept properly, but if you're an infrequent printer, the liquids that fill your ink cartridge can dry out, leaving you with a useless cartridge that has printed only a fraction of the pages it was meant to.
Since toner starts off as a powder, there's no need to worry about itlosing its liquidity. Takeaway: Laser printers offer cheaper prints per page, but toner is more expensive upfront. Toner is also the better choice for long-term use, since it stores better than liquid-filled ink cartridges. One more differentiating factor that printer shoppers may not consider when comparing printer types is size.
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