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What's so different about a laser printer from a regular printer?

I heard that it's cheaper to print stuff from laser printers. How does it work? does it actually use a laser?

Public Comments

1. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_printer and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_printer
2. well,, i don't know if it uses a laser, but they use this substance called "toner" i think it is cheaper, but i myself have never owned a laser printer. but, they have been around for a long time though. hope this can help
3. A regular printer takes forever and a laser printer shoots copies out very very fast.
4. Laserz faster. and better.
5. A laser printer uses 'toner' instead of ink and light/HEAT during the printing process to actually "burn" or "melt" the images/letters onto the paper. Toner is powder-y and the heat activates it. Inkjets use 'ink' and if you notice, for the most part, print "wet" (ever notice that if you use really cheap paper and tell it to print on "high quality" that the ink seems to seep through to the back??) Laser printers generally are a bit more expensive on the 'front end' to buy -- that is, they cost more than a $99 inkjet printer. However, acknowledging the fact that most inkjet cartridges are costly - $36 for color; $15-20 for black -- and you are lucky to get one reams' worth of paper printed from a set of inkjet tanks (that's 500 sheets/ream) - and rarely that, you'll find that toner (even at $65-100) over time will cost less because you should get at LEAST 3-5 reams of paper worth of printing from that toner (we're talking black/white laser only --NOT COLOR). Understand though, page yield (which is what we're talking about here) is not that easy to pin down... they used to use a pretty rigid formula to get those advertised numbers of pages per cartridge -- and since most people don't print in those parameters, it really was false information... and HP and Epson, for instance, were "called" on it a few years back. That's why you don't often see "page yield" as a spec anymore. Laser printing for the most part is also "smudge-proof"... (ever get a paper wet that was printed on an inkjet?? yuck!) since the images are 'burned' into the paper. Also, if you were to take a magnifying glass and look really closely at a few specific letters (like small a, small f, small g) on the same document printed on each machine, you will notice how much "smoother" and crisp the laser letters will appear (esp. with an HP)_ Hope this answered your questions!! Maggie B