PC Printers (OT but I value your advice)

Care to explain this?

No, they have multiple drums and are four pass but in series.

I'd learn about the technology I use rather than spout bollocks.

Maybe you'd like to learn how things work before trying to be the office expert?

So that means the paper makes a single pass - taking about the same time as it would were it receiving just black. Hence single pass printing.

Ho ho ho, you really did fall for the ad man's drivel.

Lol! you can't resist an argument can you?

I was just pointing out that your claim that a colour laser would be slow as a result of needing to lay down four colours was not always valid. Yes some will pass the paper through four times, and are significantly slower than when printing mono. However there are plenty that will produce colour at the same speed as mono.

I base this statement on experience with the machines to which I refer.

Oddly enough, so do I. If you want good colour fast then it has to be a thermal wax printer. If you can accept grey and streaky blacks, streaky colour, poor inability to resolve colour ramps and a slow print time then by all means buy a laser.

Even on printers with multiple drums, the print speeds are slowed by the need to lay colour on the page in four separate operations.

In message , Steve Firth writes

So the paper only passes through the engine once. Not four times as you stated.

It passes four times through the print engine (four drums four separate impressions on the paper).

You're confirming my suspicions about people named "Clint".

As I said before - horses for courses. Thermal wax transfer jobbies produce stunning colour (probably second only to dye sub), but they are not much cop for knocking our a bunch of handouts to go along with some powerpoint slides, or mailing out 20K copies / month of property spec sheets to prospects. They are probably not the first choice of semi serious home users looking for a general purpose printer.

Plenty of lasers will give good solid blacks. Less than perfect colour ramp performance does not matter in many applications.

What do you call a slow print time?

My Epson 1290 can take 20 mins or more to do a full page A3 glossy at max quality... now that is pretty slow. A Canon i9100 will do it in a fifth of the time.

That would be why the top end lasers print colour at pretty close to the speed of mono then. Even if you drop from 34ppm mono to 28 in colour, that does not seem very slow to me, and I am sure most inkjet users would be pleased with that sort of throughput.

In message , Steve Firth writes

How many times does the paper pass each drum then Steve?

Funny, you confirmed my suspicions about people called Steve Firth a long time ago.

I am not knowledgeable about printers generally, but have an OKI C5600 colour printer. I'm not sure if you would call it a laser, as it seems to have four light sources (?) arranged in slits - perhaps they are LEDs or something? But it takes the paper in at one end, passes it through the machine, and feeds it out the other end as a single pass. Seems to work OK and give good black and colour results. Cost was around £350 I think a year or so ago. Looked to be cheaper than HP for cartridges. hth Neil

Have a look inside a CL7000 and try again...

Why should I? I worked for Xerox for 11 years. I know how laser printers work.

Unlike you.

You still haven't answered my question, BTW.

They never did come up with anything original :-)

For the unitiated (i.e. me), please could you profer an explanation. Assume personal and SMB models.

I read that the colours are laid down one after another.

Is it always separate drums per colour?

Does the paper get heated after each colour is laid down? Logically I would have thought that it would be or the toner would be attracted to the next drum.

Is it one heating roller in the engine and the paper passes through it four times? If so, is the point model dependent? i.e. if the pass starts at the point when the paper leaves the paper tray and ends in the outfeed tray but goes round the various rollers in the mechanism several times, does it count as single pass even if it passes the same point more than once?

I noticed that the time to first copy seems to be a lot more for colour laser printers vs. mono and the copy rate less. Is the longer time to first copy because there is more going on with the electronics before the mechanics start to move or is it that the paper is taking a more tortuous path? Do the print mechanisms handle more than one copy in the path at the same time? I believe that photocopiers do this to improve the speed.

Who mentioned Xerox?

Sorry, what was it?

What better way to spend Xmas eve than discussing the merits of laser printers. I watched "American Gangster" but printers would have been a better bet.

There's a simple explaination here;