Color Laser Printers: 2005 Review

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Information Systems & Computing has been tracking and testing the emerging entry-level color laser printer market category for several years. Essentially, what has happened is that, when older printer engines became obsolete, manufacturers chose not to retire them but instead made them available to new, more price sensitive markets.

Background:

QMS introduced the first color laser printer in 1993 - the ColorScript Laser 1000 cost $12,500. Over the next couple of years Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Lexmark, Tektronix, and Xerox introduced their first color laser printers. These first generation products were heavy (well over 100 pounds), used significant amounts of power (often on the order of 10 amps), and were quite expensive (in the $6,000 to $7,500 range when equivalent black and white printers cost a third as much). All of these early printers were multi-pass printers - that is, they had to pass the sheet of paper back and forth over each of the four toner assemblies (generally cyan, magenta, yellow, and black). This meant that these printers could generally produce a pure black and white document approximately four times faster than they could produce a document with even the tiniest amount of color.

Beyond these issues, color laser printers didn't have anything like the perceived fidelity and accuracy that black and white laser printers of the day did. Colors were only suitable for business graphics and blacks often printed as a glossy dark brown. It was hard to purchase one of these monsters and be truly impressed with its output.

So, what did these early color laser printers have going for them? First, they were built like tanks - some of them are still in use ten years later. They were also very well supported by their respective companies - they were top-of-the-line for many manufacturers. Finally, they were relatively similar in functionality to their black and white brethren, and thus easy to understand for users and support professionals.

Over time color lasers improved incrementally, becoming more reliable, using marginally less power, and increasing in speed. As memory became less expensive, they became more likely to print complex color documents at the rated engine speed.

In early 2002, the first major innovation in the market occurred - manufacturers began releasing single-pass (or in-line) printers, which needed to pass the page through only once to get a four-color image. For the average user, this meant that color now printed almost as fast as black and white.

Where we are today:

The spiritual successor to that first Hewlett-Packard Color LaserJet is the Color LaserJet 4650dn. It is more than twice as fast when functioning as a pure black and white printer (22 ppm versus 10 ppm), more than 10 times as fast when functioning as a color printer (22 ppm versus 2 ppm), has 20 times as much memory (160 MB versus 8 MB), weighs over 25 pounds less (81 pounds versus 108 pounds), and costs less than a third as much ($2,300 versus $7,300). The LaserJet 4650dn also supports duplex printing and has vastly superior color fidelity. However, the 4650dn would be instantly recognizable to a user of the very first Color LaserJet. The same would be true for someone using a Konica Minolta magicolor 545, a Lexmark C760, or a Xerox Phaser 6250.

So, what's happened in the markets below this price and capability point? In late 2002, the first entry-level color printers were released at prices around $1,000 (color lasers had previously been sold at around the $1,000 point, but they had been end-of-life machines). These printers were a study in how to remove cost: they used the obsolete multi-pass engines (with research and development already paid for), were much smaller physically (less cost of materials and shipping), had few or no paper trays, basic print controllers, limited upgradeability and expandability, and little or no built-in networking capability.

Despite these significant limitations and weaknesses, these entry-level printers found their market, largely with buyers who had never been able to afford a color laser before. Three years later, pricing for these entry-level color laser printers has slid down to the $400 to $600 range. It is reasonable to expect pricing for truly bare bones color laser printers to get down into the $200 to $300 range within the next year or two.

Finally, a third category has emerged between the 'classic' departmental color laser printer and the entry-level color laser printer. This category, which we'll call a workgroup color laser, tends to have more expandability than the true entry-level printers, includes capable printer controllers, and has single-pass capability.

Recommendations:

1) Schools and Centers should be aware that there are still quality trade-offs when moving to a color laser printer. In particular, for raw color fidelity in a continous tone image such as a photograph, a properly calibrated $250 inkjet photo printer will easily outperform a properly calibrated $1,000 color laser printer. Best results for continuous tone images on both types of printers still require higher-priced specialized paper. Furthermore, unlike inkjets, color fidelity continues to increase significantly as one moves up the color laser model lines.

2) The cost delta for moving from an entry-level to a workgroup color laser is often much less than expected. Here's the current cost spread for Hewlett-Packard Color LaserJets with internal 100BaseT networking capability.

Color LaserJet 2550n $600 (entry-level network color laser printer) Color LaserJet 3500n $900 (low-end workgroup network color laser printer) Color LaserJet 3700n $1,600 (mid-range workgroup network color laser printer) Color LaserJet 4650n $2,100 (low-end departmental network color laser printer)

This relative pricing structure is reflected in other manufacturer's color laser printer lines. ISC believes that most Schools and Centers will be significantly better served with low-end or mid-range workgroup color laser printers than with entry-level color laser printers.

3) Though the cost of color laser printing has dropped over the last few years it remains more expensive than black and white laser printing. Generally, a color printer (whether it is a laser or an inkjet) should remain as a complement to the default black and white laser printer.