2009 could well be the year for personal lasers. Inkjets may no longer be the favoured choice for home equipment. After all a multifunction inkjet will cost you the same price as a laser, but the cost per copy will be three times more expensive.

What’s more a laser will print two to three times faster than an inkjet (over 15 pages per minute compared to 6 ppm). They will do so without any noise and ink does not bleed as they come out dry. When cartridges are empty, the inkjet stops printing. With a laser, you can trick the toner by shaking it hard.…and go back to the job !

Inkjet vs. Laser: Price watch

The fact that laser printers have become affordable might come as a surprise to some. What’s more, even if an inkjet and a laser carry the same price tag, the laser will be a cheaper option in the long run. An inkjet is supplied with cartridges that will give you anything from 50 to 500 pages. With a laser you get a toner that will take you through a 1,000 pages straight away…some will even last for 3,000 or 4,000 pages. Time for maths: see how much your replacement cartridges would cost for a thousand pages, then multiply it by three and add the price of the inkjet on top of it all. Then compare it with a laser to get the real picture!

Options

However comparing the two technologies is not that simple. On the one hand you get an all-in-one colour inkjet (also known as multifunction printer: one that prints, scans, copies and sometimes faxes); on the other a laser monochrome (sometimes colour, but rarely so). Difficult to compare the services then. Still inkjets do keep the upper hand in some areas.

Things are changing though. New features have invited themselves onto laser printers, as you will discover in our roundup. Network connectivity with Ethernet and wireless is now available on some models and one of them even features colour at the same price. This is quite a bold step, because if colour lasers become inexpensive…what will become of monochromes?