News & Commentary: 2006-04-29

Colour Laser Printer Roundup

Colour printing has been available for a long time in two forms: inkjet and laser. Inkjet has always been unreliable, laser has always been expensive. Inkjets are not getting any more reliable, the nozzles clog, the ink dries up, the pages smudge, the things get cantankerous and you end up throwing them away. Colour laser printing is getting cheaper... and therein seems to be the answer.

I'm going through all the colour laser printers that I can find on the net and comparing prices and capability. The objectives are:

Find a cheap colour laser printer
Find a colour laser printer with cheap consumables
Only consider printers with well-documented command languages (that pretty much means PCL and/or Postscript but I'm willing to consider other languages provided they have published documentation, Epson's ESC/Page is borderline with LGPL drivers available but poor documentation of the language itself -- epson's developer site requires you to register, but even when you do register you still get no data for any laser printers).
Only consider printers that do around 600x600 dpi, that's the limit of what you can print on ordinary paper and without a microscope you can't tell the difference anyhow. I treat the 2400dpi and above specifications with extreme skepticism.
It must be available in Australia.

Some of the below may not be complete, current champion is the Samsung CLP-550N...

OKI 5450N

Capabilities: Compatability: Prices advertised:

1384.00

LEXMARK C510

Capabilities: Compatability: PS3, PCL6 emulation and PDF Prices advertised:

636.76

Consumables advertised:

18.1 cents per page (using low yield cartridges), 16.6 cents per page (using high yield)

LEXMARK C522N

Capabilities: What does this come with in the way of ink? Compatability: PS3, PCL6 emulation and PDF Prices advertised:

899.00

Consumables advertised:

KONIKA/MINOLTA MAGICOLOUR 2450

Capabilities:

Compatability: Supports both PostScript-3 and PCL-5c, ethernet and USB.

Prices advertised:

Consumables advertised:

CANON LBP3460

Capabilities: Compatability: Prices advertised: Consumables advertised:

KONICA MINOLTA MAGICOLOR 5430 DESKLASER PRINTER

Included for laugh value only... "PageScope Raster Language" you might almost be tempted to think it is PostScript compatible... but sadly it is yet another proprietary GDI language. You can't download documentation from Konica and to work under Linux you need a binary-only printer driver. We don't want any of that nonsense.