Comment by hakfoo

I recall in the past, laser printers shared significant guts with copy machines. That's a product with an effectively 100% business market, so they're going to be way more TCO-driven.

From what I understand, once you get far enough above the SOHO market, even current printers are still that way. I suspect in the past, the small laser printer market was getting trickle-down benefits from technology innovations to service the commercial market, but now it's become its own free-standing market which no longer responds to the same signals.

It also makes me wonder if that's the road to an affordable, if overkill, printer-- a module that bypasses the scanning side of a used copier, and renders your PostScript data to it.