Laser Printers Buyer's Guide

Printing speed

Manufacturer reports of printer speeds are often somewhat misleading. Most advertisements tout the printer's engine speed, which is given in terms of pages per minute.

Unfortunately, this speed simply refers to the maximum number of sheets the printer can physically spit out per minute, not the actual speed of the printer in practice.

For files that use many fonts or incorporate complex graphics, the speed of the printer's processor tends to be much more significant than the engine speed. A large portion of print time is spent waiting for the processor to calculate where to place each dot on the page to create the desired image.

Because processor speed is not easily measured and is rarely advertised, you need to look at the type of processor to get a sense for the overall speed of the machine. In general, processors using RISC technology are the fastest available. Inexpensive machines often use 80186, 68000 or 68020 chips, all of which are relatively slow.

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