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By: Florie Lyn Masarate

A piece of advice for printer shoppers out there. Have a good look at the spec of the one you are choosing. You do not know it but you may be buying a LED printer instead of a laser one.

Laser and LED (Light Emitting Diode) printers have co-existed for some time now. In fact, most users are not able to distinguish between the print qualities of these two. Because of the closeness, stores and even web sites are categorizing LED printers as laser printers.

However, there are some inherent differences between the two.

When using a laser printer. Laser printers have a revolving cylinder, called a drum that is given a positive electrical charge. When you send an image of a document or a picture to the printer from your computer, the printer uses a low level laser beam to "draw" the image on the drum using a negative electrical charge.

As the drum revolves, it passes the toner cartridge. The toner consists of fine black powder, which clings to the electrostatic image created by the laser on the drum. It then rolls over the paper, which has been given an even stronger electrostatic charge. The pattern then transfers to the paper.

LED printers work the same way. But instead of a laser, a LED printer uses a group of LEDs built over the width of the drum. These are selectively beamed onto the drum in the form of tiny dots, or pixels.

If you are still not sure how to tell the difference between LED and laser printers by simply looking at them, here are some things that might help you distinguish them beyond their mechanics.

LED printers tend to be less expensive than equivalent laser printers. This is because LED printers have less moving parts. Instead of a laser printing bouncing off a mirror and moving over the drum, LED printers have stationary LEDs clicking on and off.

This is the same reason why LED printers will also tend to be longer-lasting than laser printers. Although at the moment, there are no actual studies to prove this point.

On the other hand, there is some evidence that LED printers will work best and last longer if you are doing print jobs involving very high volumes of paper. This is simply because when the LEDs are clicking on and off with each job, the more they switch, the shorter their life span.

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