Mono Laser printers: workhorses for home and office

It is thirty years since Hewlett Packard launched the first laser printer for the  mass market,  sourcing   a print engine  from the Japanese company Canon.   It churned out 8 pages per minute (PPM), while printing to a density of 300 dots per inch.  And it cost nearly $ 3500 -- Rs 2 lakhs in today's money.    

Now, almost all consumer laser printers print at around 20 PPM and the resolution has improved 4 or 8-fold to 1200 - 2400 DPI.  Entry-level Black and white laser printers can be had for Rs 4000 - Rs 6000. That's progress for you -- but is it really? Laser printing technology actually debuted in the mid 1970s -- when both IBM and Xerox launched   models for corporate use. What is surprising is not how the cost of laser printing has dropped  -- but how little the basic technology has evolved. There has been no radical innovation these 40 years. Then and now it remains the same process: producing high-quality text and graphics by passing a  laser beam back & forth over an electron-charged, cylindrical drum, to define an  image, tracing it with  electrically charged powdered ink, and transferring the image to  paper, under heat.

When an industry fails to innovate, it is difficult to differentiate its products. But even in this unexciting technology environment, there is room for creating customer value by small hardware and software tweaks. Of the 10 monochrome laser printers launched in India last week by the Japan-based Brother, I selected to try out one that offered two features that most lay users as well as small businesses need today:  wireless operation and  multi-functions (ie printing, copying and  scanning).

The Brother DCP- 1616NW meets both these criteria. It is a 20 PPM A4 size black and white print-scan-copy machine that offers 2400 by 600 DPI quality: this is enough to reproduce even photos quite well.  You can use it as a wired printer with its USB connector, or wirelessly, latching on to your home WiFi hotspot.  So far there is nothing to really make the 1616 stand apart from competitors -- but wait! Brother has innovated on the software side to appeal to the thrifty Indian buyer.  You can save paper by combining 2 or 4 pages on a single A4 sheet. Even more usefully the makers address a very common use case:  You can print two sides of an identity card or Aadhaar card on the same side of a paper using a special  ID copy mode,  without having to remove and re-insert the sheet.  

This is one of very few printers in this  category which comes with an auto document feeder. This translates into a small but significant advantage: It allows you to scan documents that are longer than A4 size -- like the foolscap size used by the legal profession. But I have a  feeling the 1616 will  really sell itself on the cost of replenishment. Unlike some popular brands, Brother  does not  integrate the print drum with the toner cartridge. This means you don't pay for a new drum every time you need to add toner.  This way they are able to bring down the cost of the standard 1500 page  toner cartridge to Rs 1775.  Their engineers tell me you would need to install a new drum ( Rs 2775)  only after you have  changed the toner cartridge  at least   4 times... it can add up to a tidy reduction in  annual  running cost.

A lot of  small office printing work and  much of home printing can make do without colour. If your needs are likewise, the Brother DCP 1616 NW  at Rs 11,650  seems to offer   very  good bang for your buck. If you don't have home WiFi, the DCP1601,  has almost the same features without wireless and costs Rs 9990.