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November 2006 |
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What to Know When Purchasing a Laser Printer |  |
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Q & A: Got Questions? We've Got Answers! | |||||||||||||
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Staying Current: USB for Faster Printing | |||||||||||||
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Cost Tamers: Color it Gray | |||||||||||||
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What to Know When Purchasing a Laser Printer
Compared to other printers, laser printers offer better print quality and are less noisy. And industry-standard True Type fonts guarantee a better WYSIWYG connection between the computer screen and the printer output. Before making a decision on purchasing a Laser Printer have a clear idea
of the following: What is your need? What is the printer capable of providing? Better yet just contact CRS Printek and we will walk you through this process. ■ Staying Current: USB for Faster Printing You say you don't have a USB printer? So get one of Belkin's USB Parallel Printer Adapters. The device's six-foot cable connects the ancient USB-less HP ink jet printer to the PC's USB port. It may speed up printing a tad, but more important, it liberates the parallel port for another printer (some people might want both a laser and a color ink jet) or such devices as an older MP3 player or scanner. The cable costs about $40 discounted. Belkin's online tool for choosing and understanding USB and cables is worth a trip. ■ Cost Tamers: Color it Gray This trick involves color inkjet printers. Unlike lasers, you can’t physically modify an ink jet to make it work faster, but you can trick an inkjet into speed up, and save a few bucks in the process. Turn off the color. Yep, it’s that simple. See, unless color is crucial to your document, your wasting ink and slowing down the printer if you output in color. Test it. Print a color page, then print it again in gray-scale. To do this, go to Start, Settings Printers, and right-click on the printer’s icon. Go to Properties and find the tab that lets you change from color to gray-scale. Then print the page again. The file I tested took more than 2 minutes to print in color; the gray-scale version took only 30 seconds. When you do need color, simply change the settings back. ■
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Q&A: Got Questions? We've Got Answers! Q: My printer is excruciatingly slow. A: The primary cause of slow printing is the printer itself. Each printer has a rated ppm (pages per minute) speed for repetitive pages and a set time out for the first page of print; some printers are just slower than others. But you may be able to get some relief by updating your printer’s driver. In some instances, updating a driver helps your computer and printer work together more efficiently. Make sure you have enough memory on your PC. If a slow computer is the bottleneck, upgrading your memory can help speed things up. If you happen to have a printer with upgradeable onboard memory, help yourself out by adding more.
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Laser
printers have become the industry standard in office printing and can
be connected either to a personal computer or a server. And because of
great improvements in price, size and features, laser printers are a realistic
option for home users as well. Page for page, laser printers are more
reliable and cheaper than inkjet printers.
I'm
so smitten by the flexibility and ease of use of the Universal Serial
Bus (USB) that every new peripheral I buy needs to support it. My new
laser printer, for instance, connects to my PC using a USB cable. It may
not push the printer's maximum theoretical print rate, but it gets my
data to the printer faster, so I get my printouts sooner.
Winners
List October 2006