“A reasonable compromise between quality and functionality”, that’s what James Hutchinson from PC World Australia called HP LaserJet P3005x color laser printer.

According to James, the P3005x makes an imposing printer both literally and metaphorically. The printer stands 474 mm tall with the third paper cassette attached. It supports USB and Ethernet connection and an embedded Web server for remote administration. The HP LaserJet P3005x has 80 MB of memory onboard that can be upgraded to a maximum of 320 MB. Automatic duplex is standard on this printer. For the environmentally conscious business, the P3005x is Energy Star certified.

Like all high-end laser printers, HP’s P3005x is a durable workhorse. The monthly duty cycle of this printer estimates dramatic 100,000 pages. The printer is quite efficient in terms of consumables: 6500 pages from a regular yield toner cartridge and 13,000 from a high capacity toner cartridge. Using a high yield toner you can get a cost per page of 2.8 cents.

The P3005x can also bolster its speed, another area in which it shows good results. The printer has four quality settings, ranging from 600 dpi draft mode to 1200 dpi with 170 lines per pinch (LPI). Regardless of the quality setting the P3005x achieves speeds of 35 pages per minute, with the first page out in 12 seconds, which is decent for rapid high quality printing.

Altogether with automatic two-side printing, expanded paper capacity and an Energy Star certification, the HP LaserJet P3005x proves a reasonable compromise between quality and functionality.

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The SCX-4300 has a neat footprint for an office all-in-one machine, a little wider than a typical personal laser printer, but with very similar depth and height. The sides of the machine flare slightly at the top to accommodate the A4 scanner mechanism which, unlike the SCX-4500’s, sits across the laser engine from left to right, rather than from front to back.

The software supplied with the machine is Samsung’s standard coupling of its SmarThru 4 and Dr. Printer utilities. The first deals with scanning, copying and printing, as well as sharing images, while the second is a diagnostic website. The driver itself handles watermarks, overlays and various print quality settings, laid out in a logical and easy-to-navigate panel.

The SCX-4300 is quite a nippy little printer, completing our five-page text document in just 30 seconds, or 10 ppm. The text and graphics pages (five of them again) are even quicker at 11.54 ppm and when we printed our 20-page document, it took 1:21, increasing the speed again to 14.81 ppm. Samsung’s claimed top speed is 18 ppm, so for a printer maker that’s almost obscenely accurate.

A single page photocopy finished in 11 seconds, so you could get six or so pages per minute from the machine and a 6 x 4 in. photo took little more, at 13 seconds. Both these speeds are impressive, particularly for a machine being sold at around $200 - less minus delivery.

Print quality in most areas is good. Although the maximum resolution of the machine is just 600dpi, there’s little visible sign of jagged diagonals or curves in text. When you add greyscale graphics, the quality isn’t quite so good, with some striping apparent and not many visible grey shades.

The SCX-4300 uses an integrated drum and toner cartridge, capable of printing 2,000 ISO pages. With a typical cost of just under $80, this gives a cost per page of 5.4 cents including paper costs. This is a fairly typical cost for a mono laser device and for black print from a colour one, too, so you’re not paying extra because of the comparatively low purchase price of the all-in-one itself.

This is a good, straightforward multifunction printer which would be very at home in a typical SOHO environment. It’s quite quick, produces good text and passable graphics, though copies of graphics, particularly of grayscale shades, can be very patchy. Running costs are reasonable and if your budget is tight this looks like a good way of providing yourself with the main office print, scan and copy functions at reasonable cost.

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Today we can witness how more and more color laser printer become available at low price. Some are even approaching the prices of their monochrome counterparts. Does that mean black-and-white laser printer are about to extinct anytime soon?

ARN interviewed the leading printer vendors on the color versus mono printing debate. Here we provided some excerpts from their responses.

HP

According to market development manager printing group, Irma van Leeuwen, the focus for HP is balance; using both mono and colour devices.

“We definitely don’t think mono is dead. We think color will keep growing and mono will stabilize in this growth. But we believe there will be a mix of devices on most business floors,” van Leeuwen said. “It’s all about what the customer wants rather than pushing towards a certain direction.”

Brother

Brand and marketing manager IT and office products, Heidi Webster, claimed mono will continue to be a printing stalwart.

“Certainly in the short to medium term we don’t think mono will be overtaken by color,” she said. “The mono market at the moment is still about four times larger so there is a big gap for color to overtake. But in terms of the mono printing market at the moment there are numerous reasons why color couldn’t overtake it.”

Fuji Xerox

Fuji Xerox marketing manager A/NZ, Tom Lewis, claimed it is not a choice between color or mono but more a question of finding the right balance in a business’ printing strategy.

“I would say color is not going to overtake mono printing for at least the next three or four years,” he said.

Epson

“People are quickly understanding the advantage that a splash of color or a color logo can do as far as a document is concerned when it comes to differentiating themselves,” Epson marketing communications director, Mike Pleasants, said.

“Color will still be coming down and squeeze on black and white until we reach the point that most people will say, ‘for an extra ten or twenty bucks I will have a color machine’. Then the switchover will happen quite quickly,” he claimed.

Canon

In the MFP space color has already overtaken mono, according to Canon marketing manager enterprise solutions, Kevin Ferrari. Canon’s research indicated that in the MFP space there are more color pages printed now than mono.

“The color shift, as we would generally term this, has been driven by the falling average selling price. The output costs are also in rapid decline… and other things along the lines of image quality, output speeds in terms of parity with monochrome and the business impact of clarity of documents,” Ferrari said.

As you can see, most printer industry professionals agree that while mono laser printers are withdrawing their positions, they are still alive and kicking.

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What we’re used to call “laser printers” are actually toner printer as they use toner in the first place to produce text and images. Yes, the toner is applied using laser, but that’s next step, if you reverse the process of image forming.

And now we can witness a real laser printer — Epilog Zing Laser.

(more…)

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Previously we reported the discovery of yellow dots made by color laser printers and the reaction of European Union Committee on this issue.

A study done by Electronic Frontier Foundation finds that most color laser printers add an identifying code on every page you print. This code is actually microscopic yellow dots printed on each page in a grid pattern. Normally these dots are invisible to the naked eye and can only be seen using a blue LED light.

The information in the yellow dots varies, some have just the serial number of the printer and others also have the date printed. On the picture below you can see the date and time when page was printed and the serial number of the printer.

Originally the technology was implemented to help secret services track and find counterfeiter who use color laser printers to forge money or securities. But now that color laser printers are becoming more affordable and more user gets them home, these tracking dots are making privacy advocates worry.

“There’s nothing about this technology that limits its application to counterfeit investigations,” stated Seth Schoen with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Some people who aren’t doing anything wrong may have their privacy threatened.”

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Samsung Electronics America, Inc., launches CLX-6240FX, a multifunction printer to expand the company’s lineup of mid range color MFP for office workgroup. The CLX- 6240FX is 4-in-1 MFP with built-in print, copy, scan and fax capabilities, and a maximum monthly duty cycle of 80,000 pages per month and standard paper capacity of 850 sheets.

The CLX- 6240FX delivers color documents at the speed of up to 25 PPM. The standard features include a legal size platen, auto duplex printing and copy and an 80GB hard drive.

Samsung CLX- 6240FX’s color CCD scanner has a high resolution up to 4800×4800 dpi. Among scanning features of this MFP you will find scan-to-network and scan-to-anywhere support for PDF, TIFF and JPEG files. The FRP also supports a Direct USB Interface for scanning to or printing from any standard USB drive. Scanning management tools include full Lightweight Directory Access Protocol support for effective networking and secure document management tools.

The CLX-6240FX MFP base unit is priced at $2,399 and can be purchased through Samsung’s authorized channel partners.

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Just a couple of months ago Samsung bolstered world’s smallest color laser printer (http://blog.tonercartridgedepot.com/2008/03/12/worlds-smallest-color-laser-printer-samsung-clp-310/). The other day the company broke its own record: it rolled out the new smallest color printer in the world - Samsung CLP-315K.

The new tiny printer measures only 388 x 313 x 243 mm and weighs around 11 kilos. Compared to previous generation, the dimensions have shrunk by 20%.

Despite the size, the Samsung CLP-315K color laser printer delivers 4 color or 16 black and white pages per minute at 2400×600 dpi resolution and has 32 Mb on board.

There is also a multifunction version of this printer, CLX-3175FNK (the left one on the picture with cute Korean girls). This MFP features not only direct print from various devices such as flash-drives, cameras, mobile phones, but it also supports scanning of documents directly to removable storage.

The two devices are yet available in Korea only, but it should not take long for them to appear on American and European markets.

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