CartridgesDirect stocks laser printers from HP, Brother, Kyocera, Lexmark, Canon and OKI, covering mono single function, mono multifunction, colour single function and colour multifunction configurations. Every model has its compatible toner cartridges stocked on the same site for easy ongoing supply.
Laser printers are ideal for businesses and home offices that need fast, reliable and cost effective document printing. With options ranging from compact desktop printers to high volume multifunction devices, our range includes solutions for every workspace, budget and printing requirement. Browse leading brands, compare features and find the right laser printer for your needs.
A laser printer builds each page in three stages. First, a laser beam draws the page image onto a rotating photosensitive drum by selectively charging areas of the drum surface. Second, toner, a fine dry powder with an opposite electrostatic charge, adheres to the charged image areas on the drum. Third, the page passes through a heated fuser unit, which melts the toner particles and bonds them permanently to the paper.
The fuser is the reason laser output behaves differently from inkjet on the page. Fused toner sits on top of the paper fibres as a thin plastic layer, which makes it water-resistant, smudge-resistant and highly resistant to fading. A laser-printed document left on a desk for five years looks the same as it did the day it was printed. The same inkjet document, exposed to any humidity, degrades noticeably within months.
The fuser also means laser printers have a brief warmup period. Cold-start printing on a laser printer takes two to five seconds longer than a printer already at operating temperature. In shared office environments where the printer is in near-continuous use, warmup is irrelevant. In low-volume home offices where the printer may sit cold for hours between jobs, it is a minor but real interruption that inkjet printers avoid entirely.
Mono laser printers print only in black and white. Colour laser printers print in full colour using four toner cartridges. Both types fuse toner to paper using the same process. The decision between them has direct implications for hardware cost, consumable cost and the complexity of the maintenance cycle.
The case for mono laser
Mono laser printers are cheaper to buy, cheaper to run and mechanically simpler than colour equivalents. A single black toner cartridge, sometimes combined with an imaging drum, is the complete consumable set. Mono laser toner costs 2 to 5 cents per page at standard coverage. For offices that print invoices, reports, correspondence, contracts and internal documents, mono covers the full requirement. Most business documents do not need colour.
The one situation where mono fails: when a document genuinely requires colour output. A mono laser cannot print a colour chart, a highlighted report or a branded presentation. If colour output is needed even occasionally, a mono laser forces a workaround: a second colour printer, outsourced printing, or a colour inkjet for low-volume exceptions.
The case for colour laser
Colour laser printers use four toner cartridges: black, cyan, magenta and yellow. Each replaces itself independently when it runs low. Colour laser cost per page is higher than mono, typically 11 to 15 cents for a full-colour page at standard coverage, but considerably lower than colour inkjet at any significant volume. For offices that regularly produce colour client reports, presentations, marketing collateral or internal communications with colour graphics, colour laser delivers consistent output at a cost per page that inkjet cannot match above 200 colour pages per week.
Colour laser printers also print mono faster and at lower mono cost than inkjet equivalents. A Brother MFC-L8390CDW prints mono pages using only the black cartridge, so mono printing on a colour laser costs the same per page as on a comparable mono model.
Pages per minute (PPM)
PPM is the rated print speed at ideal conditions: continuous printing of standard text documents with a warm printer. In real-world office use, PPM is reduced by document complexity, colour coverage, first-page warmup time and data transfer speed from the computer or network. For a single user printing one document at a time, the difference between 22 PPM and 35 PPM is rarely noticeable. PPM matters in shared environments where multiple users print simultaneously and queue length builds during busy periods.
Duty cycle
Duty cycle is the maximum monthly page volume the printer was engineered to handle without accelerating mechanical wear. Running consistently at the rated ceiling shortens the machine’s working life well below what the support timeline implies. Match the duty cycle to actual monthly volume with at least 30 to 40 percent headroom above what you actually print. An office printing 3,000 pages per month needs a printer rated for at least 4,000 to 5,000 pages per month minimum, not a device rated right at that ceiling.
First Page Out Time (FPOT)
FPOT measures how long the printer takes to deliver the first page from a cold or idle state. High-volume shared laser printers in near-continuous use rarely print from cold. Low-volume office and home office laser printers start cold for almost every job. A 10-second FPOT versus a 6-second FPOT is not noticeable in a high-volume environment. It is genuinely frustrating when you print one document per hour and wait every time.
Toner yield and cost per page
The cartridge price divided by its ISO page yield is the cost-per-page figure that determines how much the printer actually costs to run. Two printers at the same hardware price can have very different consumable costs. A printer with a $40 toner cartridge at 1,500 pages costs 2.7 cents per page. A printer with a $60 toner cartridge at 6,000 pages costs 1 cent per page. Over a year at 200 pages per week, the difference in annual toner cost between these two options exceeds $350. Check the cartridge cost per page before committing to hardware.
For offices also running inkjet printers alongside laser devices, HP ink cartridges are stocked at CartridgesDirect alongside toner for all laser brands in the range.
Orders on stocked laser printers placed before 2PM leave the same day. Free shipping applies to eligible orders over $75. Toner cartridges for every laser model stocked are listed on the same product page.
When laser toner cartridges are empty, they go into the CartridgesDirect Planet Ark recycling program rather than the bin. A free postage-paid satchel comes with every eligible consumable order. Collect eight or more empties, seal the satchel and post from any Australia Post roadside mailbox. Close The Loop processes the returns and recovers the toner and plastic components.
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