Not sure why you want to compare the old $3000 printer with a new $250 printer.

The old one was indented for commercial use. The $250 printer is hardly even intended for SOHO. It is good enough for people who wants 10 pages/month and have tired of their ink jet printers always drying out.

My $2000 workgroup printer with ease matches the laser printers I worked with 86/87 when helping setting up desktop publishing solutions for printing companies.

I'm not sure what film I have been using, but I have not been able to see any stretch of the film over the 20x30cm area of an A4 film. What I have seen with many printers is that the laser ray isn't scanning at a constant speed, resulting in perfect registration in the middle and sides of the page, but being off in one direction at 25% and 75% of the paper width. This is caused by the rotating mirror that controls the angle of the laser ray. Generating a 1200 dpi image and post-process it works well for solving this distortion before printing. I haven't needed to do films with really fine pitch, but for the films I have done, I have verified that remaining distortion is matching the precision I can measure the distortion with. Emitting two fine-pitched grids and moving them above each other - even with one of the prints rotated 90 degrees - shows the grid lines align very well.

The important thing is that the printer is repeatable, so that it is possible to calibrate the print.