Whats 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?

A laser printer uses toner instead of ink and light/HEAT during the printing process to actually quot;burnquot; or quot;meltquot; 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 quot;wetquot; (ever notice that if you use really cheap paper and tell it to print on quot;high qualityquot; 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 quot;calledquot; on it a few years back. That s why you don t often see quot;page yieldquot; as a spec anymore. Laser printing for the most part is also quot;smudge-proofquot;... (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 quot;smootherquot; and crisp the laser letters will appear (esp. with an HP)_ Hope this answered your questions!! Maggie B

See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_print… and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_pr…

Laserz faster. and better.

A regular printer takes forever and a laser printer shoots copies out very very fast.

well,, i don t know if it uses a laser, but they use this substance called quot;tonerquot; 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