COMPUTER ACCESSORIES Saving time and money with laser printer

One drawback is that affordable models don't print in color.
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON POST
Shopping for a printer isn't much different than shopping for a car: Some models have an alluring flair, but those typically guzzle gas. Sometimes it's smart to go for a subdued model that gets great mileage. Ink or toner is the gasoline that runs a printer; the model you choose now will determine how much you'll pay for a long time to come.
Laser printers can seem not just subdued, but positively boring compared with the inkjet models that line most store shelves. All the affordable models can only print in black and white, not color -- forget cranking out greeting cards and 8-by-10 blowups of photos -- and still cost more than most inkjet models.
In return, however, laser printers can save a lot of money over time. Printing a page of black text with an inkjet will typically cost 5 to 10 cents in ink alone, while the toner used in laser printers only costs a penny or two per page.
Saving time
Laser printers also crank out text pages much faster than inkjets, as much as three times faster, but make far less noise in the process. They tend to produce darker blacks than most inkjets, and discerning eyes may notice slightly sharper characters from a laser printer. Lastly, the toner in laser printouts doesn't run if it gets wet, unlike most inkjets' output.
We tried four inexpensive laser printers from Brother Industries Ltd., Lexmark International Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Samsung, all intended for use in homes or small offices. They go from $122 to $200 at retail, and all work with Windows and Mac OS X. The Lexmark and Samsung models also tout compatibility with several major versions of Linux.
Across the board, these four printers worked quietly and quickly, delivering a 12-page document in about a minute (HP's PSC 2510 inkjet printer/scanner took more than three minutes for the same file). Beyond their standard USB port, some also include a parallel port for use with old computers.
Results
HP's LaserJet 1012 (Win 98 or newer/Mac OS 9.1 or newer, $200) was among the fastest printers we tested, turning out 12 pages in only a minute. Like the others, it includes a 150-sheet tray to store paper and a manual feed slot that lets you print on an envelope or letterhead without removing your usual paper. Its text looked sharp -- but images appeared somewhat muddy.
Price-conscious shoppers should look first at the Samsung ML-1710 (Win 95 or newer/Mac OS 9 or newer/Red Hat, Caldera, Debian, Mandrake, Slackware, Turbolinux, SuSE Linux, $200): Street prices of $122 to $190 made it the cheapest printer in this group. Print quality for text and images was excellent, and the paper tray held a generous 250 sheets.
The Brother HL-1440 (Win 95 or newer/Mac OS 8.5.1 or newer, $180) includes both USB and parallel ports, plus a 250-sheet tray. Its text was as sharp as any of the other printers, and its image quality surpassed the other printers, providing good detail in a broad range of gray tones. Its relatively small two megabytes of memory may make you wait longer for large print jobs, but this can be upgraded to as much as 34 MB.
Lexmark
For text, the Lexmark E220 (Win 95 or newer/Mac OS 8.6 or newer/Red Hat Linux 7.2 or newer/SuSE Linux 7.3 or newer, $200) was fast and quiet, but its images, marked by thin horizontal gaps, weren't great. A few of our test pages were smeared with dark blotches of toner, and when at rest the printer would occasionally startle the cat with a strange burping sound. The Lexmark includes parallel and USB ports and holds 150 pages.
Laser printers are typically very quiet, and this bunch was no exception. The HP seemed to be slightly louder than the other printers, but even that was a relief from the usual racket of inkjet printers at work.
None of these low-end printers supports the PostScript print language, which may make them inappropriate for complex desktop publishing applications. But for letters and business documents, these printers do the job impressively and inexpensively.