Before you buy a laser printer - Resolution and speed of laser printers

Laser Printers 

Read more about the resolution and speed specifications of   laser printers.    

Laser printers are now considered to be the standard for the busy working   environment. But as the price continues to go down, so the laser printers gain a greater acceptance among home and personal users alike. Whether it is for your personal or business needs, we would like to arm you with all the information you'll need to help you decide on the right Laser printer.

Resolution of Laser Printers.

Resolution is a major factor that determines image quality.

Printer resolution is the number of dots contained on a printed photograph. Printer resolution is measured by dots on a one-inch line. It shows how many individual points can be drawn in one-inch. Every laser printer prints a certain number of dots per inch horizontally and vertically. Because images are formed as a series of individual dots, a larger number of dots will allow higher resolution of the printed image. The higher the number of individual dots, the more improved the final print quality will be.

The standard resolution in most laser printers today is 1200 dots-per-inch but some laser printers still use a resolution of 300.

The 300 dpi printing resolution considered being adequate for most office text documents but for the most professional-looking documents, 600x 600dpi (dots per inch) resolution is considered necessary.

Many laser printers now offer up to 1,200dpi or 2,400dpi resolutions, allowing you to print impressive, more detailed pictures and quality documents. If you plan on printing many graphics, a high-resolution printer is the safer choice. But if you mostly print text documents, resolution should not be your main concern.

For example, a 600-dpi printer can print 360,000 (600 x 600) dots on one square inch of segment, which means that each dot is 1/600th of an inch in size. If horizontal and vertical resolutions were different, generally both will be displayed (i.e., 4800 x 1200 dpi).

Note that, choosing the higher print quality usually reduces the speed of printing each page.

The resolution of laser printers ranges from 300 x 300 dpi to 2400 dpi (printers based on LED head technology), allowing you to easily create even sophisticated graphic printouts.

Six- and seven-color laser printers can bring into being better-looking prints than four-color laser printers.

Dont get confused with the printers enhanced DPI resolution, (achieved by software algorithms) with the printers physical or true resolution.

Many printer manufacturers like Epson or Hewlett-Packard has their own, so called Resolution Enhancement Technologies, which enhances resolution of the printer, using a software algorithm (interpolated resolution) that makes an image seem as if it were scanned at a higher resolution. It inserts smaller dots at the edges of lines and to smooth the rough edges.

You should always check the printers optical or true resolution. Always the true or optical printer resolution matters most. 

See the differences between Printer resolution and Image resolution. 

Speed of Laser Printers: Supposedly the more you pay usually comes to better speed, but be careful, manufacturers and vendors often tend to be optimistic and list faster print speed specifications for their featured product than you might experience  in the real world. These specifications are often founded on low-quality settings for simple text pages or on printing in draft mode. Vendors often dont include the time that is required for the laser printer to communicate with the computer and process the information before printing. Actual speed when printing an outsized color photo or complex graphics can be a bit more time-consuming. Of course, performance depends on more than rotational speed, and there are differences among laser printers. In reality, most monochrome printers have text speeds ranging from 10 to 22 pages per minute and speeds for graphics and full color pictures varying from 2.1 to 15pages per minute. Corporate laser printers are able to print text at nearly twice the speed of home models. To determine both the quality and speed of your future printer, dare to test drive before you buy it if possible, by printing the same test page on multiple printers and judge the result for yourself. Try to buy the fastest laser printer you can afford. Printing in monochrome is much faster than color.

Unlike Inkjet or dot matrix printers, which are ready to work as soon as you turn them on, laser printers usually require some time to warm up before the first printed page because they have to melt the toner to the paper, which requires some time to warm up the fuser to operating temperature. This is adding up to the time it takes to actually print the first document. Inquire as to how long it takes the laser printer to churn out the first page. An abundant number of laser printers are equipped with  so called instant-on" fusers, which are designed to reduce warm-up time, allowing you to deliver the first page in 15 seconds with your laser printer.

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