Labs

Personal mono laser printers

At the bottom of each review there are five star ratings: Quality, Speed, Features & Design, Value for Money, and a final Overall rating. These scores are calculated according to a combination of performance tests, objective scores, costs and subjective quality ratings.

The printers in this month's test are aimed at the budget-conscious user, so we carry out our tests using standard 80gsm copier paper. In our first test, we set each printer to output 50 copies of the single-page business letter included in the recently published ISO sample document. Though there's no single standard for calculating toner coverage, by most measures the ISO page is around 5% coverage, providing a rough approximation to everyday use. Due to the way laser technology works, the amount of toner on a page makes very little difference to the print speed, though naturally the more you use, the sooner you'll need to replace the cartridge. The ISO document features a small red graphic, but we print in monochrome even on the colour printers to ensure a level playing field for this test.

Our second test calls for 50 copies of the ISO colour newsletter. This sample page includes black text on a variety of coloured backgrounds, including a rainbow gradient, and a photo. This exercise tests the various colour printers' abilities to produce sharp text alongside colour graphics, and exposes the speed differences between printing colour and monochrome documents. For the monochrome printers, we look at how cleanly the coloured shades are converted to greyscale: as you'd expect, the monochrome printers exhibited no significant speed differences between this test and the previous one.

Next we print a range of coloured tables, charts and DTP layouts from Excel, Word and Adobe's Acrobat Reader. Unlike the first two tests, these documents don't involve any repeated pages, enabling us to determine whether print speed is affected by the printer having to process each page image afresh, rather than reproducing a single page multiple times. In general the impact is very small, though for some printers it was sufficient to affect that model's average score across all of our speed tests.

Finally, we print out our high-quality tests, based on our two standard high-resolution montages (one monochrome, one colour), consisting of photographs, shades, gradients and text at a range of sizes. For these tests we make use of any driver options that are available, in order to provide enhanced print quality; several printers here didn't offer any such options.

Moving to Vista

A laser printer is an investment, and even a budget laser can be expected to last for a number of years. Therefore, even if you're happy with Windows XP for the foreseeable future, it's worth knowing that any new hardware you purchase will still be usable should you make the leap to Vista - or buy a new computer with it pre-installed. So, although not all the printers on test advertise Vista support, we've tried each one out under the new operating system as well as XP. We were pleasantly surprised by the results: eight of them successfully installed "out of the box" with all expected functionality. The other two (the Dell 3010cn and the Kyocera FS-920) worked fine once we'd downloaded updated drivers from the manufacturers' websites. Remember that, while a printer may work under Vista, it might not be fully supported by the manufacturer: the feature table on p102 details the current state of manufacturer support.

Quality

Quality is a subjective rating arrived at by two members of the PC Pro team, who independently assess the output of each printer against a range of different criteria: black text, for example, should be solid and readable, even at small sizes, while greyscales should be even and gradients should be smooth. For colour printers, we also take into account the printer's ability to blend colours and to accurately reproduce the shades you see onscreen. The Quality rating awarded to each printer is a function of its total score across these tests.

Speed

Speed is traditionally a key advantage of personal laser printers over inkjets, but competing products offer a range of speeds at the same price point. Rather than relying on manufacturers' claims, we time all of our tests to find out how swiftly each printer handles various types of real-world print job. Our measurements represent the actual print time, from the moment the first page is taken up to the moment the last page drops into the output tray. Start-up time can, however, significantly affect a printer's effective overall speed, so we also consider the time to the first colour page (that's the time we had to wait between hitting "print" and receiving a printed sheet when the printer was in a "ready" state). This figure is partly based on the speed of the host PC and the nature of the document, but since our tests use the same computer to send the same document to each printer it helps identify which lasers are quick off the mark and which take a more leisurely approach.

Features & Design

The Features & Design rating is calculated by allocating points to a wide number of criteria. We're looking for both technical features - such as built-in Ethernet, software functions and front-panel controls - and practical benefits, like warranties and the amount of toner initially included at purchase with each printer. We also consider ergonomic and aesthetic issues: is this a printer you'd want on your desk? Would it even fit?

Value for Money

This score represents the overall "bang-per-buck" delivered by each model on test. Naturally we look at the cost of the printer itself, but then we also factor in a calculation of the long-term running costs. Toner is the most obvious variable, but there are other parts in a laser printer that may eventually wear out, such as the fuser, image drum, transfer belt and waste toner bottle. In this sector of the market, it may be uneconomical to replace a worn-out part, and we take into account how this could affect your investment. The overall cost of owning the printer is then weighed against its scores in the other categories to give a rating out of six.

Overall

The Overall rating is a straight average of the other four scores, though it may sometimes appear higher or lower than expected due to rounding.