The first laser printer was produced by Xerox when Xerox researcher Gary Starkweather modified a Xerox copier in 1971.[1] Laser printing eventually became a multibillion-dollar business for Xerox.

The first commercial implementation of a laser printer was the IBM model 3800 in 1976, used for high-volume printing of documents such as invoices and mailing labels. It is often cited as "taking up a whole room," implying that it was a primitive version of the later familiar device used with a personal computer. While large, it was designed for an entirely different purpose. Many 3800s are still in use.

The first laser printer designed for use with an individual computer was released with the Xerox Star 8010 in 1981. Although it was innovative, the Star was an expensive ($17,000) system that was only purchased by a small number of laboratories and institutions. After personal computers became more widespread, the first laser printer intended for a mass market was the HP LaserJet 8ppm, released in 1984, using a Canon engine controlled by HP software. The HP LaserJet printer was quickly followed by other laser printers from Brother Industries, IBM, and others.

Most noteworthy was the role the laser printer played in popularizing desktop publishing with the introduction of the Apple LaserWriter for the Apple Macintosh, along with Aldus PageMaker software, in 1985. With these products, users could create documents that would previously have required professional typesetting.

As with most electronic devices, the cost of laser printers has fallen markedly over the years. In 1985 the HP LaserJet sold for $2995.00 and weighed 71 pounds (32.2 kg). The Apple LaserWriter (which shipped with a more powerful processor and the Postscript page description language) weighed about 70 lb and cost almost $7000.00. (Work rules in the factory producing the Laserwriter forbade any worker lifting the printer unassisted.) Today a comparable laser printer with more memory, a higher speed and duplexing capability costs about $300.00. A bare-bones laser printer costs less than $100.00.

Color laser printers add colored toner (typically but not always cyan, yellow, and magenta -- see CMYK) in three additional steps or passes. Color adds complexity to the printing process because very slight misalignments known as registration errors can occur between printing each color, causing unintended color fringing, blurring, or light/dark streaking along the edges of colored regions.

To permit a high registration accuracy, some color laser printers use a large belt the size of a full sheet of paper to generate the image. All four layers of toner are precisely applied to to the belt, and the combined layers are then applied to the paper in a single step.

Color laser printers typically require four times as much memory as a monochrone printer to print the same size document, because each of the four CMYK color separations needs to be rasterized and stored in memory before printing can begin.