Most laser printers only print in black and white, but a lot of the time all you hear about are laser printers. Believe it or not, color laser printers, as well as color laser toner, do exist… but they are expensive. One would think that with such an efficient process as laser printing, color toner would be much cheaper.
Laser toner in general, even just black toner, tends to be on the pricey side. Particularly when compared to a basic inkjet printer, a laser printer is quite complex and full of moving parts. Usually, a fine powder gets mixed together inside of a black laser cartridge as the printer “warms up”, and then the paper gets a specified coating of the fine powder. It sounds simple, but the process is actually a bit more complex than that, involving electrostatic image writing and carbon particles.
Color ink tends to have a higher price than black ink since it usually contains multiple colors of ink as opposed to just one. When a picture requires a particular combination of colors, the printer uses these colors to pull it off. The simple fact that color laser toner follows a similar idea makes it more expensive. However, because there are three colors needed to complete the final printout (whatever it may be), it has to do the same process as black toner – except it has to do this multiple times. It’ll happen once with yellow, once with cyan, once with yellow, and sometimes a second time with black.
Different color laser printers will have different levels of intricacies in their setup. While some only have a single system that handles everything, other printers use a series of multiple systems, generally one for each color. In that case, only the systems associated with colors that are needed for that print job are actually used. Most companies now sell one cartridge per color instead of the all-in-one cartridge, but this is actually good for the consumer. You won’t have to replace the equivalent of 4 cartridges when only one of them is out of toner.
Color toner cartridges actually tend to pay for themselves over a long enough period of time, which is another reason why they tend to be so expensive. A single ink cartridge in an inkjet printer tends to produce fewer pages than a single toner cartridge in a laser printer. A laser printer cartridge will last for many, many pages. When you take a look at the long run, especially if you put it in terms of cost vs. page output, color laser toner is signifantly cheaper than color inks.
Since laser printers are designed largely for printing text or presentations for business use, color toner is often inadequate for high-res image printing. Color laser printing emphasizes efficiency and speed, so while clarity is necessary, it won’t have the highest clarity possible, especially when it comes to images.
When you decide to invest your money in a good printer, be aware of how much printing you intend to do, as well as what you intend to print. These two aspects will be very important when you’re trying to pick out the best printer for you. Be sure to check the information on both the cartridge and the printer itself so that you can know how many pages per minute you can expect it to print. Most should at least claim a page yield, like “up to 3000 pages”, or something like that. Take your time and compare the prices and page counts you find to other products in order to find the best price overall.