With all the neat little gadgets that scientists have come up with over the last few years, the
portable Canon laser printer is an excellent example of them. They seem to have come up with a technology that can take the printing devices of today and turn them into portable ones, sort of. It depends on what you call a laser printer. Most people mistake today’s inkjet printers as laser printers, and rightly so s the quality is surprisingly the same.
The laser ones work by taking each individual page waiting for printing and scanning into the device’s memory. Only after the entire document waiting in the queue, whether it is 1 page or 100, will it actually start to work. Using toner cartridges, which are made of powdered plastic and color particles, they stick to the drum located within the device. This drum rotates and an actual laser will turn off and on to create the image or words on the drum. The drum is then rolled over the paper to which the toner combination ink sticks to it by heating it.
Because of the heating process, more space is needed. Today’s portable laser devices are actually inkjet printers and are almost of the same quality as the laser types. This is why many people mistake the inkjet types for the more expensive ones. The inkjet devices spit the ink out onto the paper in a very different manner than the laser ones, though a print head, which the others do not have. The inkjet version can also print while it is waiting for the queue to fill up, unlike the laser. This allows it to start printing and pause when it needs to.
Another difference between them is their weight. While an inkjet can weigh as little as 1 to 5 pounds, a portable laser device can weigh as much as 15 pounds, which is much more than the inkjet. However, the 15 pounds still is not too much for some people’s standards and is still light enough. While inkjet versions have many advantages, the portable Canon laser printer is almost as good and certainly worth using.