With the ever falling prices of both monochrome and colour laser printers, this month we set about sorting the winners from the less impressive performers, testing spool and print speed, print quality and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) over two different levels of print volume to ascertain who was the real king of the small office and medium business printer market.

Despite the phenomena that are email, Web access and PDFs, the paperless office still seems to be a little way off -- a pipe dream in the minds of the technically superior while those yet to embrace the glory of virtual data are left with furrowed brows and handfuls of crinkled paper.

One of the single most integral pieces of hardware in the office environment, (even the PC Authority machine gets a decent daily work out) ironically, the office printer is often used to print out email.

While inkjet is still the product of choice for infrequent and price conscious users, this month's roundup demonstrated what a speedy laser with reasonable running costs can offer to the office environment in the text and image printing departments. And perhaps now more so than ever before it's time to dump that expensive, slow inkjet and pick up a replacement budget mono or high quality colour laser printer.

Our roundup is targeted towards the home office and small to medium business price bracket with print volumes of 50 to 150 pages daily over a two year print cycle. With prices ranging from a staggeringly low $299 to a less modest $1,999 there are plenty of quality and speed variances between models to be found in our results.

As was prevalent in several cases in our roundup, a cheap to purchase printer may not be the most inexpensive to run long term. Quite the opposite, in fact, with plenty of more expensive printers yielding higher Value results from less expensive consumables. Be sure not to miss our explanation of ownership cost in our TCO boxout on page 88.