A laser printer is a one-time investment with long life and low maintenance cost. This is not a model for which you have to buy a cartridge almost every month – here are different types of printers and their differences. Let’s figure out what a home laser printer should be, which one to choose and what needs to be considered. Let’s go through the characteristics of such devices, and also, as usual, give a small selection of popular models in 2019.
Main characteristics
It makes little sense to buy a monochrome printer for your home. It is more likely to be in the office, where the main printing documents. At home, you will want to print photos, beautiful pictures from the Internet, prints on thermal transfer paper.
The printer will have to be refueled in four different colors (including black, of course). You will not have to do this so often – this is the main advantage that the use of a laser-type device gives. So it will not be superfluous to clarify how much the original consumable costs and whether there is a compatible one.
Translated into human language, how many pages can be printed before the printer has to be refilled. A good home laser will print between 1,200 and 2,000 pages before refilling. The yields of black and color toner may vary; this is also worth considering.
For home, print speed is not as important as the size of paper you can use. As a rule, home “lasers” support A4 or A3 sizes. Check what can be printed on: cards, labels, glossy paper, transparencies, envelopes, matte paper, thermal transfer paper, and so on. This is usually indicated in the characteristics.
Interface
A modern printer can receive documents for printing through different channels – wired and wireless. It can be either USB or Ethernet or Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC. When considering which laser printer is better to buy for home use, then ideally it should support wireless interfaces. After all, you may suddenly want to print a photo from a smartphone or tablet, for example – “over the air” is much faster.
Canon I-SENSYS LBP613Cdw
Finally, let’s add a fairly popular Canon model. There is everything here – both duplex printing in 4 colors, and standard format and size of the print (210 × 297 mm and 216 × 356 mm, respectively). The printer can handle cards, labels, glossy paper, envelopes, and matte paper. In a word, the whole “gentleman’s set”.
The resource of the cartridge is like that of HP – 1300 and 1400 sheets for color and black and white printing, respectively. It makes no sense to buy original consumables – it will be more expensive than a new printer. However, compatible refillable cartridges can be used, which significantly reduces the cost of ownership.
Supports Ethernet, Wi-Fi 802.11n, USB 2.0, Direct Print, and Air Print. Users have complained about problems with printing in OS X, but the new version of the driver has fixed the problems.
Also, the printer does not work very well with thick paper weighing more than 180 grams, so you cannot print especially large cards on it. But for its price – quite a solid device for the home.