Conventional consumer colour laser printers transfer powdered toner to receiving paper, using an electrostatic process. Heat bonds the toner to the paper. The resolution of the resulting print is decided by how finely the powdered colours have been ground and the settings used in the printer driver.
Powder toners have a couple of advantages: they don’t dry out if the printer isn’t used for a while and they also produce very sharp printed text and deep, rich blacks. Toners come in generous packs, which means you don’t need to keep changing cartridges (as you do with a consumer inkjet). Laser printers are faster than inkjets – and also cheaper to run.
However, they only use four toner colours: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. These are the traditional CMYK colours of commercial printing and their tonal gamut is less than that of modern inkjets with six or more colours.
It’s not really fair to compare the output colours of a laser printer with the colours and tonal subtlety produced by a six-or eight-colour inkjet. A fairer comparison is with printed books, which are also reproduced through four-colour printing. In our experience, an entry level laser printer can match – and often exceed – the print quality of many commercially-distributed ‘coffee table’ books that sell for $50 or more. However, that said, there are some common faults that can appear in prints from laser printers:
1. Track marks on the surface of the paper, caused by the paper feed system. You can’t do much to prevent them, although their visibility can be reduced by laminating the prints.
2. Gloss differential, where different tones have different ‘shininess’ when the print is viewed from a shallow angle. This can also occur with inkjet printing and is reduced by laminating the prints.
3. Metamerism, in which colours look different under different types of lighting. Almost all laser prints will appear ‘warmer’ in tone under incandescent lighting but take on a greenish colour cast under fluorescent lights. You can’t do anything to prevent this.
4. Each printer will reproduce colour balance, brightness and contrast in slightly different ways, which can influence the end result.
5. Colour and brightness banding can be visible in some prints. It’s usually quite subtle but indicates variation in the density with which the toner has been applied.
All laser printers leave the factory calibrated for document printing; not photo printing. Default settings are based on standard office printing paper (80~100 gsm), rather than covering a wider paper range. Colour, brightness and saturation adjustments are available, but may not be accessible in Photo mode. Some defaults can’t be over-ridden in the photo printing mode.
Paper Choices