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Personal colour lasers
Fast, high-quality printing is now an affordable option for every business - large or small. We put nine of the best personal colour lasres to the test.
If you thought colour laser printers were purely the preserve of large office workgroups, think again. For as little as $388, you can have your own personal colour laser, whether you work in a large business or a small home office. And, despite the low price, the majority of the nine here offer the speed, quality and features you’d normally associate with much more expensive printers.
In fact, Brother claims its HL-2700CN can churn out 31 mono pages per minute and eight in colour. Lexmark’s C522n, meanwhile, is capable of 20ppm in both mono and colour.
And, unlike an inkjet printer, these colour lasers will print thousands of pages before needing replacement toner. Text quality is better than an inkjet too, although it’s worth bearing in mind that none of the lasers here can rival even a budget inkjet for photos – they’re intended for colour business graphics.
If you want to share your printer with a small workgroup, six of the nine on test have Ethernet ports as standard, while others are easily upgradable or are available in a network version. The Konica Minolta and Xerox will also accept hard disks for storing print jobs and other data. Extra paper trays and duplexers can be added to most models too.
However, while all nine printers appear great value, you can’t ignore the running costs, which vary considerably from printer to printer. Toner isn’t the only consumable – there are also fusers, image drums, transfer belts and waste toner bottles to consider. Depending on how many pages you print, you may never have to replace any of these, so be sure to check the figures on p112 before deciding which printer to buy; we’ve calculated the all-inclusive running costs for various levels of usage.
And in addition to our exhaustive speed and quality tests, we’ve examined every feature to find out exactly how each printer fares in the real world. Whatever your needs, read on to find out which laser should have you reaching for your wallet.
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