Is there a difference between a monotone and a monochrome laser printer? Also some of the specs I'm looking at say (for example) 1200x600 dpi while others say up to 1200x600...is there a difference?

Does a monotone printer print text all the same size?

Monochrome: representing colours with shades of gray (example has 16 colors)

Monotone: consisting of a uniform tone of one color (example has 2 colors)

That photo is

What Vin said, although I wonder if Monotone was a typo, as I've never heard of a monotone printer in recent years.

It should still print text fine, but yeah... where in the world did you find a monotone printer?

It was one of the models listed on futureshop.ca.

I love laser printers. I have a brother HL-5170DN which has built-in networking (so all computers in the house can use it) and auto-duplexing (print both sides w/out having to go switch out paper and turn it around). I think I paid $200 for it... which is a lot compared to sub-$70 ink jet printer... BUT after more than 4 years we are still on the original toner cartridge (and they apparently come with "starter" cartridges). We used to have to buy ink jet cartridges every few months for $50/pop, so in the long run, if you print mostly text, it's a much, much, much better deal. I'm also happy with this model because brother provides linux drivers, too.

It prints text in any size, it can also print pictures but they don't look good. It's b&w only, not for photos. They have color laser printers but they were much more than I wanted to pay at the time.

Yes, it's going to be for printing text (sheet music, actually). My inkjet is too blurry.

I got an $80 laser printer and it's already paid for itself for text printing. Text looks really crisp too.

I think you need a PostScript capable printer to print proper vector graphics. However, unless I'm mistaken pretty much every laser print supports that these days.

So wait. If I buy a PCL6 printer instead of PostScript am I not going to be able to do music?

I bought a Konica Minolta Color Laser Printer years ago and I'm sure it has paid for itself. I got so sick of the increasing regularity with which I would have to replace ink jet cartridges and then the printers just seemed to turn to crap. I probably bought the printer in '04 and my daughter had to replace the black cartridge once due to printing alot of school work. During my last deployment I ordered a complete set of cartridges and my wife had to install one or some of them. I must confess that I do not do a huge amount of printing but I bet it has paid for itself versus using ink jet printers over the past six years.

Some music software uses a font for all the music symbols, not vector graphics. I don't really understand how printing works or if that makes a difference, but it might be relevant. I can't imagine a printer not being able to handle a custom font and some straight lines...

Oh, that's probably fine. I wasn't sure if it was PostScript but modern printers should support something that lets you print custom fonts.

I would imagine that most all printers support custom fonts. PostScript printers support straight up vector graphics, I believe, since even the text is described as paths.