Color Fast

Clocking Print Speeds

Are color lasers fast enough for everyday use by a workgroup of 10 to 20 people? For text they certainly are, and for color graphics they're faster than any alternative. Most of the printers we tested were specified by their vendor to print color documents at the same clip as black-and-white. But in our tests, the printers pushed out a black text document about four times as fast as they printed color graphics: The average speed for our 10-page text document was 15.1 pages per minute; the average for graphics was 3.7 ppm. Still, 3.7 ppm looks pretty good next to the 1.3 ppm average of the ink jets we tested most recently. More important, color lasers' text speed is nearing that of monochrome lasers: The last set of monochrome laser printers we tested averaged 16.9 ppm for the same document we used to test this group. That means you can find a color laser to replace your monochrome laser without losing much speed--even if you have a large workgroup that prints a lot of text files.

We saw a wide range of speeds and were pleasantly surprised by the results for the two sub-$1000 printers we tested, Oki Data's $799 Oki C5100n and Samsung's $850 CLP-500N. The Oki printed text at 9.9 ppm, while the Samsung printed at 15.3 ppm; still, the Oki's better support hours and text quality kept the Samsung off the chart. Xerox's $4199 Phaser 7300DN was the fastest of all, at 23.3 ppm for text, while HP's $3549 Color LaserJet 5500n printed text at only 13.5 ppm.

The Xerox Phaser 6250N, the HP Color LaserJet 5500n, and the Oki Data Oki C5100n all turned in fast graphics speeds: 6.1 ppm, 5.2 ppm, and 4.9 ppm, respectively. The slowest graphics speed we clocked was from the $2395 Kyocera Mita Ecosys FS-C5016N, an LED model that printed graphics at a sluggish 1.3 ppm (comparable to ink jets).

Inspecting Output

The new generation of color lasers puts another truism out to pasture: that color lasers can't print text as well as monochrome lasers. In fact, PC World's jury gave 8 of the 13 models tested an Outstanding for text quality, and 4 more a Very Good. Only 1 printer, the Xerox Phaser 6250N, did not match the text quality of a decent monochrome laser. Its letters looked slightly hazy around the edges, though they were still good enough for all but the most formal correspondence.

In our line-art test, which monochrome laser printers usually pass with flying colors, we print a page of closely spaced parallel lines. Now, most color lasers make the grade, too: Nine of them rated as either Outstanding or Very Good on this test, printing the narrowest lines clearly, without mucking up the interstices with the random dots we affectionately call "crud." Only two printers, Samsung's CLP-500N and Oki Data's Oki C5100n, received the lowest score possible, printing uneven lines that resembled strings of beads and blending color toner into the black (a common technique for creating a richer-looking black), which made narrowly spaced lines look like plaid fabric.

We also tested the group on printing color and gray-scale photographs on standard paper. Monochrome lasers print notoriously poor gray-scale photos, and color ink jets are too slow for a workgroup to share, so color lasers have a broad niche to fill. And for the most part, we were impressed by how well they fill it. Several printers, especially the two Hewlett-Packards--the Color LaserJet 3700n and 5500n--produced smooth-textured gray-scale photos with fine detail and lifelike shadows and highlights. Several others, including the Xerox Phaser 6250N, and Oki Data C9500dxn and C7300n, printed detailed, lifelike gray-scale images marred only slightly by dottiness or lines. Despite these advances in color laser quality, if you need top-notch prints of color and gray-scale photos, ink jet is still the only affordable technology that really delivers. The print speeds and text quality of these higher-end color laser printers, however, qualify them to replace monochrome laser printers--at least in offices that can afford them.

Calculating Costs

So many elements add to the cost of owning a color laser printer that it's tough to estimate the cost of printing a page--but we tried. The PC World Test Center limited itself to gauging toner consumption and estimated a cost per page (see the chart for specific numbers).

We created a test page consisting of a spreadsheet and two bar charts, to approximate a typical business-presentation page. Printer makers calculate their page yields using a document with 5 percent coverage each of black, yellow, red, and blue toner--which is meant to approximate the typical rate of consumption; however, we did not scientifically measure the toner coverage for our page (see our test page).

We printed our file, and counted pages, until either the printer stopped or we deemed the print quality no longer acceptable. Interestingly, though every printer output the same document, there was no consistency in which of the four toners ran out first. In all but two cases, the printer stopped when the first toner cartridge hit empty. The IBM Infoprint Color 1354n and the Lexmark C752n continued printing long after the toner had run so low that the prints looked weathered, and long after we stopped counting the pages as usable. After printing--and counting--almost 80,000 copies of the same document, we concluded that if our test file is representative of typical business documents, the manufacturers' figures for per-page toner cost are significantly too low. Although our page yields and estimated costs per page varied widely, on average page yields were one-third lower than the vendors' specs.

Our average toner cost per page was 13 cents, ranging from a low of 6 cents per page for the Kyocera Mita Ecosys to a high of 18 cents per page for the HP Color LaserJet 3700n. We used standard toner cartridges in all but two printers. Lexmark and Xerox supplied high-yield cartridges for the C752n and the 6250N, respectively. We found their high-yield cartridges no more cost-effective than other printers' standard cartridges: The Xerox's cost per page was just below average, at 12 cents, while the Lexmark's was 15 cents per page.

A set of toner cartridges for any of these printers is a hefty investment, though the sets vary widely in price. A set of four standard-capacity cartridges for the IBM Infoprint Color 1354n costs about $700--almost one-third the price of the printer itself. Standard cartridge sets for some of the large-format models surpass $1000. Some vendors, such as Kyocera and Samsung, hasten the day when you'll shop for replacement cartridges by shipping their printers with partly empty "starter" cartridges.

Several other consumable components, such as imaging drums, add to a color laser printer's ongoing expenses, though they last a lot longer than toner cartridges. The part-ceramic, part-metal drums in Kyocera Ecosys models, for example, are designed to last the lifetime of the printer. The Oki Data C7300n's drums cost $144 for the black and $155 each for the color, and Oki Data rates them to last for 30,000 pages. On some printers, however, the imaging drum is part of the toner cartridge.

All printers have a replaceable fuser, an element that heats toner to affix it to the paper. The Xerox Phaser 6250N's fuser costs $200, for example, and is rated to last for 100,000 pages. Most color lasers also have a component called a transfer belt or image transfer unit. On HP's LaserJet 3700n, the transfer unit costs only $80 and is designed to produce up to 75,000 pages, depending on how many four-color files you print; the LaserJet 5500n's transfer unit costs $200 and is designed for up to 120,000 prints. In total, the per-page costs for color from a color laser are several times higher than those of black pages printed on a monochrome laser.

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