Laser printers are becoming a lot more common as prices decrease and the quality of output improves. Laser printers use toner (a black or coloured powder) rather than liquid inks and like photocopiers they use a xerographic printing process – more information of this can be found in our glossary section.
There are several advantages of laser printers as unlike thermal printers laser printers do not require special paper. When compared with inkjet printing laser printers offer no smearing, lower cost per page and faster print speed. There is an inherent disadvantage that laser printers produce raster images, and except in the highest-quality versions they are less able to reproduce continuous tone images such as photographs.
The cost of using a laser printer can be weighed up in looking at the cost of replacement toner, drum units and if necessary the replacement such as other consumables such as the fuser and transfer assembly.
The first laser printer was produced by Xerox when one of their researchers Gary Starkweather modified a Xerox copier in 1971.
