Laser printer is a common type of the printing system that uses laser beam to produce the high quality text and images on the photosensitive drum. The images are then transferred to the paper by xerographic printing system. Laser printers are sometime called page printers because the entire pages are transmitted to the drum before the toner applied on it. One of the commonest characteristics of laser printers is their printing resolutions.
Usually they offer resolution between 300 dots per inches (DPI) to 12 dots per inches. They are also capable of producing variety of fonts by means of two ways font cartridges and font soft. They are also considered very fast printers and their printing capacity is 4 to 20 texts pages per minute.
How it Works
With the few remarkable differences the laser printers work in the same way as the photocopier machines. Laser printer works on the static electricity.
Inside the printer there is revolving drum or component that is known as photoreceptors. The photoreceptors are considered as a key component in them. Other basic components that make up a laser printer includes discharge lamp, toner hoper, laser scanning unit, fuser, developer roller, photoreceptor and drum assembly. The charge corona wire gives the positive charge to the drum inside the printer. The printer omits a laser beam across the surface as the drum revolves.
The text and graphics is printed as a pattern on electrical charges. After this the drum gets positively charged with a black powder known as toner and it gets attracted towards the negatively charged area of the drum. Some printers use a stream of light emitting diodes (LEDs) instead of a single laser light.
Printer Buying Tips
Before buying a printer you may think about your printing requirements. Whether you want to print basic black and white text, color text, graphics or you need high quality printing. If you need high speed, precision, excellent printing quality and accuracy then you may go for the laser printers. The toner cartridges are expensive as compared to the inkjet printers but they last for a long time as compared to the inkjet cartridges. Before buying you should examine the extra features such as USB ports and Ethernet port etc. Also check if the printer is compatible with your computer or not. Based on the type of work, know the memory requirement and check if the particular laser printer, which you are going to buy, fulfils your memory requirements or not. Also try to choose a printer with enough paper capacity so you should not bother to put the papers again and again. Also make sure that the manufacturers of the printer are providing enough technical support and driver’s availability on their website.
Advantages
The most important advantage of the laser printers is their speed. They are fast enough to transfer the information to the printer device quickly. It allows you to print all the pages at a time rather than to print only a section of the page. Another advantage is that the use of the toner is much cheaper as compared to the use of the toners in the inkjet printers. It’s very handy to fill the toner cartridges. They can work for long time without any need of changing the toner cartridges and paper refilling. The most important factor, which I personally like is that the most modern laser printers comes with 3 in 1 or 4 in 1 features i.e. you can have printer, scanner, photocopier and fax machines all built-in in the printer. The same cartridge and papers are used for the multiple purposes like photocopy, printing and fax. This provides you ease of work and saves your precious time during work.
Conclusion
In short, the laser printers provide excellent text quality, graphics quality, free of noise printing and multiple features at one place. In addition the other major qualities are high speed, printing process, high memory, standard available fonts and the printing language.