Looking to buy a printer? Get yourselves familiarised with the world of Inkjet and Laser printers. And if you are already wondering which one to buy, we give you the breakdown of both of them to decide better.
Inkjet printers-
These are the cheaper, smaller kind and are quite capable of printing both text documents and high quality colored images like photos. Inkjet printers work by spraying ink droplets onto the paper.
Laser printers-
Laser printers are the expensive and bulkier ones. They are partners for the long run and have a low print cost per page. Laser printers work by melting toner powder onto the paper thereby creating a print.
Although both the types of printers work great, they are better in one particular area, each. And one type may need more printer repair service than the other.
Monochrome Laser printers: Ideal for text and documents that are only black and white.
Color Laser Printers: Recommended for text documents with simple colours, and medium-quality color images and photos.
Photo Inkjet Printers: Excellent for printing great quality photos with huge color range and tonal depth.
Therefore, to print gallery quality photos, one should opt for a photo inkjet printer. And, for printing medium quality colored images color laser printers are mostly preferred over inkjet printers as it prints more pages from the laser toner cartridges than from the inkjet cartridges
Apart from the picture quality, here is a comparison between the print speed, print volume and page yield:
Print Speed
Laser: 15-100 pages/minute
Inkjet: ~16 pages/minute
Laser printers are designed for offices and workplaces, and therefore print faster, while inkjet printers are designed for quality over quantity, hence printing slower at about 16 ppm.
Print Volume
Print volume refers to the number of prints a printer can give at a time. A laser printer has a large print volume because of its complexity to quickly print bulk documents. And since an inkjet printer is mostly intended for home/ personal use, it’s print volume is significantly smaller.
Page Yield
Toner cartridges, as seen in the laser printers, have a higher amount of page yield than ink cartridges, as seen in the inkjet type. Moreover, toner cartridges last longer than ink cartridges. This is because the ink cartridges contain an ink volume capable of printing between 135 – 1000 pages compared to the page yield of 2,000 to upwards of 10,000 by the laser cartridges. And lastly, because of this high yield, laser printers require less printer repair in the long run.
| Inkjet Printers | Laser Printers | |
| 1 | Small and light | BIg and Heavy |
| 2 | Ideal for personal use/ home setting | Ideal for office/ workplace setting |
| 3 | Excellent for high resolution photos and images | Recommended for text documents, bulk prints and low resolution photos |
| 4 | Less expensive | More expensive |
| 5 | No warm up time is needed before printing | Needs buffer time before printing |
| 6 | Prints very slowly | Prints at a lightning speed |
| 7 | Page yield is comparatively low | Page yield is very high |
| 8 | Ink cartridge is expensive and needs regular refill | Laser cartridge does not need change even after thousands of prints |
| 9 | Can print on a variety of papers like glossy, textured, etc. | Not very adept at printing on different types of papers. |
To summarise, inkjet printers are cheaper, ideal for low density and high quality prints. While laser printers, though expensive, save on the bulk prints.