Comparison of Printer Speeds

Desktop and workgroup printers for business use a variety of technologies, each with its own cost, speed, and quality tradeoffs. A company that prints its own manuals, financial reports, and other multipage documents requires a faster printer than one that only prints invoices on occasion. Laser printers have the fastest speeds as of the date of publication; dot-matrix printers have similar speeds but lower quality, and inkjet printers are significantly slower.

Laser and LED

Laser and Light-Emitting Diode (LED) printers use the same technology as copiers, printing a full page at a time. A laser beam or an array of LEDs scans the surface of a light-sensitive metal drum inside the printer, forming static electricity patterns. Toner powder adheres to static charge areas; when the mechanism presses the paper against the drum, the toner binds to the sheet, resulting in a printed page. Desktop laser printers have speeds ranging from 4 to more than 50 pages per minute, with commercial models capable of producing up to 1,000 ppm.

Thermal

Thermal printers are specialised devices that are found in cash registers, bar-code systems, label printers, and calculators. An electronic system in a thermal printer controls an array of heating elements that create tiny hot spots on specially treated paper. The paper turns black when heated above a certain temperature. Because it does not require ink, the printing process is tough, economical, and simple to maintain. Some of the fastest examples can print at 300 millimetres per second, or 60 pages per minute. These printers are not intended for general-purpose word processing or report writing.

Inkjet

Inkjet printers produce high-quality documents in small quantities. It prints by spraying microscopic droplets of ink directly onto a page from a cartridge; the cartridge moves back and forth across the paper, gradually rendering the document a line at a time. Inkjet printer speeds typically range from 1 to 20 ppm; the higher the printing quality, the lower the ppm.

Dot Matrix

Despite being largely replaced by newer inkjet and laser technologies, dot-matrix printers remain popular due to their dependability, low operating costs, and ability to print multipart forms. A dot-matrix printer is a type of impact printer that creates characters on the page by striking an inked ribbon with thin wire pins. Their draught mode speed ranges between 200 and 1,120 characters per second, or about 12 to 60 pages per minute, depending on the model. The print mechanism makes two or three passes per line of text, filling the shapes of each character, in a high-quality mode that runs at half to a third of the maximum speed.