Best Laser Printers

There are a lot of different kinds of printers on the market today. There are inkjet printers, laser printers, thermal printers, and even dot matrix printers still out there. Suppose you’ve looked over the pros and cons of each type and have settled on the purchase of a laser printer. There’s still a bewildering array to choose from, manufactured under a half dozen or more reputable brand names! Some are stand-alone printers. Some are printers and scanner/copiers. Some are also faxes. Some will automatically duplex, while others will scan PDFs of your document and e-mail it to someone all in one step. They can be color laser printers, or black-and-white only printers. While you will have to sort through the various features and options on your own, based on your own preferences or needs, the best laser printers to buy can be grouped by manufacturer.

Dell
The Dell 2130cn is one of the best laser printers for home offices or for business offices with only a few employees. It is a color laser printer. It’s upgradeable with additional paper trays. It is network enabled, right out of the box. Most importantly for most home office users, it’s cheap. Expect to pick one up for around $350, which is a great buy for a laser printer.

Xerox
The 6280N in the Xerox Phaser line is a little more expensive than the Dell, coming home with you for around $450, but that extra C-note buys you faster print speeds, a 400-sheet paper tray, and PostScript compatibility. It also is network enabled, very easy to use, and produces good better photo prints than the Dell.

HP
The HP CP2025N costs around $400, and provides good, solid value for the money. It’s got a fast print speed, produces excellent color images, and has a high monthly duty cycle. A potential drawback is that the print speeds for black-and-white documents is, for some reason, sluggish, but not so slow that it will present much of an issue for the average user. Like the other laser printers listed, this HP printer also comes network-ready right out of the box.

Lexmark
The Lexmark C544dn can go home with you for about $500, and it’s worth every penny. It has a standard 250-sheet paper tray, but if you need a larger tray you can upgrade with a 550-sheet add-on drawer. Unlike the other printers listed so far, the Lexmark will also duplex. It is small, light and easy to move around, but it’s networking capability isn’t nearly as straight-forward as the Dell, Xerox or HP. Color and black-and-white printing speed are both right at 25 pages per minute. Print quality for text, graphics and photos is the best of the printers listed in this article.

Samsung
The Samsung ML-2851ND isn’t really the same class as the other printers mentioned so far, because it isn’t a color printer. But, it’s priced appropriately. It can be purchased for $200. Even though it’s monochrome only, and does a poor job of printing graphics, it’s a great laser printer for home offices because of the price and because of the superb text printing quality. It has a built-in duplexer, prints 30 pages per minute, and is very easy to connect to your network. If you don’t need color output, and if your main purpose is to print letter documents, then this is the best printer listed here.