Color Laser Moves Toward Mainstream

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Color laser printers for under $5000 may sound like science fiction, but the reality may be appearing in offices soon. Last year, QMS's ColorScript Laser 1000 shattered the previous $30,000 price barrier with its $12,499 price tag. Office personnel who once thought color was only for print shops could now produce color-enhanced documents and transparencies in-house. Now other companies are following QMS's aggressive pricing.

Grady Yarbrough, senior product manager at QMS, sees the beginning of a broader market for color laser printers, where customers will want to replace older laser printers. Eventually, Yarbrough foresees, color lasers will dominate the color market due to their high quality, ability to print on any paper, and lower cost than dye-sublimation printers. But he also thinks many customers are waiting for the price to drop below $5000.

George Mulhern, marketing manager of HP's Advanced LaserJet Operations, says ``the HP Color LaserJet Printer with 300 dpi will list for under $7500 and have consumable prices at about the same rate as [those for] the HP ColorJet 1200C.'' HP says it will announce a target release date for the Color LaserJet in mid-September. The company says the printer will target everyday business printing.

Xerox's product manager for Workgroup Color Printing, David Kwiatkouski, sees two markets for his company's $8495 4900 color laser printer. The first is ``offices that already use color but want to switch from minutes-per-page [i.e., dye sublimation] to pages-per-minute technology.'' The second is companies that want to bring all their color work in-house.

Greg Porell, director of Color Imaging Products and Service for market-analysis company BIS (Norwell, MA), is not as optimistic as the color p rinter companies. ``Users want color but aren't really willing to pay much for it. Inexpensive, color-jet printers are very popular,'' he says.

Porell says that, for the short term, color laser printers will remain a small market, primarily for short-run color illustrations and spot color. Farther down the road, Porell believes that breaking the $5000 color laser printer price point is important but that ``speed, not price, will open up the broader market for color laser printers.''

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Color Laser vs. Color Ink-Jet

                        Color Laser         Color Ink-Jet
Initial cost            $7500+              $500+
Consumables cost        greater than $150   greater than $130
Pages per minute        2                   1
Resolution (dpi)        300-600             300-720
Production quality      High                Medium


Today, color ink-jets clearly are best for occasional color users, but serious color users will find that color laser printers work better.
 In the future, as prices drop, lasers will broaden their appeal. ``Production quality'' refers to the printer's ability to produce multiple excellent-quality copies. ``Consumables cost'' refers to cost per 1000 copies, 5 percent of which are color.