Experiments on core- and cladding-pumped Er-doped fiber lasers demonstrate that the output power more than double when they are cooled from room temperature to liquid-nitrogen temperature, reaching 95 mW and 1.21 W for core and cladding-pumping fiber lasers respectively in the “eye-safe” emission band around 1.6 μm. The results are explained in terms of the spectroscopy of Er at lower temperature, which gets closer to the outstanding spectroscopy of Yb:silica.