How do you know/check if your printer is a PS or a PCL printer?

Question

What is the difference between PS and PCL printer? Which is better? Which is expensive?

Answer 1

If you mean Postscript vs. PCL... PCL is the printer control language invented by Hewlett Packard, and is common amongst *most* of laser printers, and a lot of the Inkjet printers as well.

Postscript, on the other hand, is a more advanced printer language invented by Adobe. It's capable of describing the entire page and scales up to almost any resolution, so most commercial typesetters use Postscript. Since the language is proprietary people must pay Adobe for rights to use it, and only high-end printers are now equipped with Postscript interpreter.

You can find printers that'll do both. In fact, Hewlett Packard makes several laserjets that's PS compatible. They usually have the "PS" suffix, and are about $150-250 more expensive than their non-PS brothers, MSRP of course.

For normal use, you don't need Postscript. However, if you need to preview stuff that'll go onto a commercial press, then you need Postscript printers.