

Some manufacturers also quote a recommended duty cycle figure, which is useful to know if you’ll be putting your printer to heavy use and don’t want to wear it out quickly. This represents a one-time maximum number of prints a device can produce if you really push it, rather than the number of pages it can print regularly, so always pick a printer with a duty cycle that exceeds your requirements. If you plan to do lots of printing, opt for a device with a high duty cycle figure. But inkjets can suffer from blocked nozzles if you don’t use them often and flushing them out wastes ink: if you tend to go weeks without printing, you’re still better off with a laser printer.

Despite popular belief, inkjets are often cheaper to run than their laser equivalents, too. Finally, the paper is heated by a fuser, which melts the toner to the page.Ī laser printer used to be the only option for fast, high-quality document printing, but in the last few years, office-focused inkjets have started running them close for speed and quality. This process occurs on all four drums – for cyan, magenta, yellow and black – to make up the final colour image. A positively charged sheet of paper is passed over the drum, and the toner is transferred. This is attracted to the discharged areas drawn by the laser and repelled by the negatively charged background.

Negatively charged toner is then released on to the surface of the drum. A laser then “draws” an image of the page to be printed onto the surface of the drum, discharging the areas it hits. Laser printers work by negatively charging a light-sensitive surface called an optical photoconductor (OPC) drum. Also, because the ink takes a second or two to dry, they might be slower still when duplex (double-sided) printing. Printers with higher resolutions – measured in dots per inch (dpi) – can place more dots on the page.Īs their print heads usually need to move about to cover the page, inkjet printers tend to be slower than lasers. Inkjets create prints by placing thousands of tiny dots over every inch of the page.
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How to choose the best printer for you What’s the difference between laser and inkjet printers?

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