They're better at networking, so if you have a group of people using a single printer, lasers can handle a far heavier load than inkjets 30,000 or more documents a month. And laser printers are much faster than inkjets about three times as fast. In office environments where time is money, the advantages of a laser printer are clear. For busier offices, the Minolta DeskLaser's slow speed and complicated network setup will be frustrating. The Lexmark comes with a 266MHz processor and 64MB of expandable memory to run the print-job queue.
Most laser printers use a multi-pass system for laying down color ink.
Each color is printed one at a time to the paper, contributing to the slower speed of color printing. The Phaser 850N, above, due to its wax ink, can lay down all colors at once in a single pass, improving color printing times. Unfortunately, no printer lives up to its rated speed, and all manufactures quote this speed in draft or economy mode. In the body of this article, we've used tested speeds rather than manufacturers' ratings. Because color laser printers are often networked, most come with Ethernet adapters .