We put a selection of high-capacity office printers to the test. We analyse what printer is best for your workplace and what dosn't work.

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This month, the PC Authority Labs team looks at a colourful range of printers suitable for the small-medium office market.

There are two areas to look at when testing laser printers: speed and print quality. We used a range of different documents to test the different aspects of each and weighted the results to give the Quality and Speed scores. More detail on each test is also provided online at www.pcauthority.com.au.

The LBP-2410’s real strength clearly lay in its speed, as opposed to its print quality. It was the third fastest printer overall, but fell in the shadow of the Labs Winner OKI C5100 for printing times and TCO over both low and high monthly duty cycles.

There isn't much point, after all, in owning a network printer capable of printing thousands of pages per month at a ridiculously low price per page if the people that use it don't print out that much on a day-to-day basis.

Clearly finishing first in the colour laser category, the C5100 is the pinnacle of affordable laser printing. Big and bulky, it doesn’t have a small footprint though, so be prepared to give up some of your workspace for it.

As most of the devices we tested consisted of inkjet units, we were interested to see how the laser printer in the MFC-4600 stacked up. Relatively lacking in features, the MFC-4600 is geared toward productivity, performing well in our speed tests.

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Printer sales in Australia fell 12 percent in the fourth quarter of 2003 to 390,000 units, and are expected to fall another 13 percent for the full year 2004, IDC said.

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Impressive print quality, a good turn of speed and decent features, but it simply costs too much to own.

Samsung's smallest and most attractive mono laser, the ML-1510 is a speedy little printer with plenty of potential for the sub-$500 price bracket. So good in fact that we had to recommend it for its above average scores in all categories.

The first thing we noticed about this printer was its strange physical resemblance to the Labs Winner, and significantly more expensive, HP LaserJet 1300. There are plenty of technical specs to differentiate the two, including RAM, print resolution and OS support, all swinging in HP’s favour though.

Ignore the price – incredibly low running costs Make this a winner.

Workgroup Office Laser Printer

Surely, this can't be right – a full-colour laser printer for only $1,800? You'd better believe it, The catch is that the 2300W is a GDI (graphical device interface) printer, so it doesn't have an internal processor and relies on the host system to do all the legwork in preparing the pages. Furthermore, it's parallel and USB 1.1 only and it can't accept a network card. That aside, the printer offers a fine set of features for the price. There's a 600 x 600dpi resolution with a 1,200 x 600dpi Fine ART mode, along with 4ppm colour and 16ppm mono print speeds.

Every office, whether it is a small, medium or large corporate environment, needs a printer for its day-to-day operations - this is a given. Despite the cliché that is the paperless office, streamlined electronic information exchange and the continued sales of inkjet and laser printers would suggest this is still not a reality and we think it may not be for some time.

TCO, or total cost of ownership, is virtually a mantra when it comes to volume printers. Unlike other peripherals, like monitors or scanners, the initial purchase price of a printer represents only a small proportion of its overall cost over its lifetime. Consumables, like toner and replacement image drums, add to the cost, and some printers with low initial purchase prices can easily turn out to be significantly more expensive than more pricey units, after a couple of years.

An impressive little printer, its incredibly light and portable design makes the LBP-1120 perfect for the space-conscious small business home business operator with limited work area.