Giving Color Printers an Improved Image
A relentless series of advances in computer printers has already deposed once-proud technologies such as daisywheel and dot-matrix. And Hewlett-Packard’s new Color LaserJet 5 shows that the black-only laser printer may be the next to go.
Not only does the Color LaserJet 5 print excellent photo-realistic images--which its predecessor did not--it prints black-only pages as fast or faster than many office laser printers at a significantly lower cost per page. And it prints color pages much more cheaply than its competitors.
HP says the new printer can produce a page of text and graphics (42% ink coverage) in color for less than any of its own black-only printers could print the page in black--about 12 cents for the color page on the Color LaserJet 5, compared with about 13 cents in black on its other laser printers. Printing the same page in black on the Color LaserJet 5 costs about 3.5 cents.
The upfront costs, or course, are not so low: The Color LaserJet 5, which connects directly to a personal computer, goes for about $6,000, and the network-ready Color LaserJet 5M runs about about $7,400. Both include PostScript and work with both Macintoshes and PCs.
The new printers use nearly the same internal hardware as the original HP Color LaserJet, introduced in September 1994, notably a color printing engine built by Konica. But print speed has been boosted substantially with a faster microprocessor, and HP has pioneered a new way of controlling placement of color toner on the paper, which creates much sharper images.
Neal Martini, general manager of HP’s Color LaserJet division, won’t divulge details of the process, but it does have a name: Image REt 1200, which stands for image resolution enhancement technology. The Konica printer engine has a true resolution of only 300 dots per inch, and HP says its new technology yields the equivalent of 1,200 dots-per-inch resolution.
The company also argues that its development makes dots-per-inch an obsolete measurement of print quality. To see why, consider how traditional color printing--as well as color television and color photography, for that matter--functions. What looks to the eye like solid hues are actually groups of dots of varying colors that our eyes blend together. The original Color LaserJet created colors by putting dots of cyan, magenta, yellow and black toner close together in dithered patterns to give the impression of various colors.
But the new printer uses a process more like the one an artist uses to mix colors on a palette. It stacks the four colors atop one another in varying amounts on the same dot to create millions of colors. The same process, according to Martini, also reduces the amount of toner placed on the paper, which partly accounts for the lower per-page printing costs.
Another reason for lower costs is that each of the four toners is replenished as needed from bottles of dry toner. There is no toner cartridge to replace, and the toner bottles--at $9 for black and $44 for each color--are a lot cheaper than typical toner cartridges.
Michael Zeis, editor and publisher of Color Business Report in Uxbridge, Mass., a trade publication, said there is a “real night and day difference” between the print quality of HP’s old and new Color LaserJets. He also vouched for the accuracy of HP’s printing cost-advantage claims.
With its low page costs and speeds of up to 10 pages a minute for black-only printing and two to three pages a minute for typical color pages, it becomes practical to churn out multiple original copies of a color-highlighted report on the new Color LaserJet 5, rather than having copies made of the original on a color copier.
The new printer achieves excellent color quality on standard copier paper. But it can also print on special glossy paper for finer detail or on transparencies for overhead slides. Up to 500 sheets of paper can be fed from a front tray and optional rear tray. Color printing is limited to letter-size paper, but black-only printing can be done on legal-size and 11-by-17-inch paper too, using optional feed trays.
* Richard O’Reilly, director of computer analysis at The Times, can be reached via e-mail at richard.oreilly@latimes.com
