Eric Bangeman - Sep 28, 2005 2:00 am UTC
Manufacturer: Konica Minolta (product page) System requirements: 400MHz Pentium II, 256MB free disc space or PowerPC 750, 256MB free disc space; Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/2003, Mac OS X 10.2+, Linux Red Hat 8.0+/SuSE 8.1+ Price: US$499 (shop for this item) Motor Generator Set
While black-and-white laser printers have long since been affordable for the home user, those wanting affordable color printing in the home have been stuck with inkjets. Inkjets are fantastic for printing the occasional letter, e-mail, and photographs, but they are not the answer for high-volume print jobs, especially if you want color.
My first inkjet was an Apple Stylewriter that—along with my PowerBook 165—served me well in grad school. Not long after graduating to my first PowerPC machine (a Umax SuperMac J700 with a blazing fast 180MHz PowerPC 604e) I also made the switch to color printing with my first Epson Stylus color printer.
Being able to print in color was a rush, and after getting my first digital camera I discovered the joy of printing out a high-quality print on inkjet photo paper. U was never quite satisfied with the whole inkjet experience, however. Ink was expensive, and trying to refill the cartridges myself to save a few bucks invariably resulted in ink-stained fingers. And if the printer sat idle for a long time, printouts would suffer from blank spaces or other printing problems. A quick cleaning of the print heads would solve that particular, but that takes time and ink.
Eventually I tired of the high cost of consumables. Photo paper is more pricey than the regular stuff, but it's the high cost of printer ink that really got me down. Judging by the pricing, it's worth its weight in platinum and then some. That miniscule amount of ink inside your inkjet cartridges works out to something in the neighborhood of US$3,000 per gallon.
Scoff if you will, but a May 2005 Consumer Reports study (subscription required) pegged the cost of 8x10 photo prints at anywhere from US$0.80-1.15 per page for inkjet printers. 4x6 color prints are cheaper, at around 30-65¢ a page, but it's cheaper still to just fill my USB thumbdrive with images and have them processed at Costco for 17¢ a print. So unless you have a need to print out your color photos at any hour of the day or night, using Costco, Walgreen's, or some other service is less expensive than printing them out yourself.
Contrast that with the cost of printing an 8x10 photo on a color laser printer. The Konica Minolta DL2430 works out to be about half as much per color photo as an inkjet, at 45¢ per page.
Laser printers are also faster than inkjets. They really shine when it comes to black-and-white printing. The fastest inkjet printer can crank out 10 pages per minute in low-quality mode. Compare that to the DL2430 which doubles that with a rated speed of 20ppm, and at 1200 x 600dpi resolution to boot. Black-and-white printing with the DL2430 is a bit cheaper too, with a 3¢ per page cost (the inkjets range from 3.0¢ to 7.5¢, with most of them in the 4.5-6.0¢ range).
On the other hand, toner cartridges are more expensive than ink cartridges. Expect to spend about US$70 per cartridge when replacing your toner cartridges, and the printer uses four of them in total (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black). However, Konica rates the replacement cartridges at 4,500 pages each, so unless you're printing hundreds of copies per day, you shouldn't have to replace it too often. When compared to the typical 200-400 page yield for inkjet cartridges, you end up ahead.
Having definitively settled on the relative merits of laser printers and inkjet printers for once and for all, let's take a look at the printer itself. That's why we're here, right?
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