It’s not quite an office grade product, but the MFC-7840W is a great choice for a busy home office.

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.

One of the most impressive printers we received, it features plenty of well-thought out and logical technical features. One of only a handful of printers we tested that had an LCD for displaying print information and settings, the B4300 has eight single press buttons allowing you to view menu options, change values and cancel print jobs.

While it produced well-defined and solid text all the way down to small font sizes, the E321 did feature a few minor print quality shortcomings; these included heavy toner saturation, making the images dark and murky while poor dithering on gradients made the images appear banded and blotchy.

A nice small footprint, which is an advantage in small office spaces, is the order of the day with HP’s offering to the mono marketplace. The LaserJet 1300 produced high quality text, with above average readability even on a grey background and at small point sizes. The embedded image on the test page was slightly over exposed, but still had good definition and solid well-formed black text, helping it to score highest overall in neutral text readability. Our monochrome test page turned up some minor blemishing and driver banding, but a reasonably smooth gradient helped the printer finish in first place overall here too.

Rating exceptionally well in the TCO portion of our analysis, the PagePro 1200W scored almost twice the average for purchase price due to its incredibly low retail price. Don’t be fooled by the price tag though, this unit features plenty of qualities some other more expensive printers can only dream about.

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.

Finishing second overall in our roundup the Epson EPL-6100 was edged out of first place by the HP 1300 and the OKI C5100, with its incredible range of features. However, this is not to say that the Epson EPL-6100 doesn’t have a wide range of functions. On the contrary, it boasts some innovative design and logical technological functions. Its large 250 page input tray makes it ideal for bulk printing, although it shares the same much smaller volume 100 page output tray capacities as both the Lexmark E321 and Minolta-QMS PagePro 1200W models.

We originally debated whether or not to include a multifunction unit in this roundup as we feared it would not have been an apples with apples comparison, or that the print quality could not compare with the other printers on test. Given the performance of the SCX-4216F though, we were proven wrong.

The 2300 series, HP's new laser offering for the small to medium-sized workgroup, includes a myriad of significant improvements over the previous 2200 series.

HP has a huge range of laser printers, stretching from enormous 50ppm A3 corporate behemoths with full finishing capabilities to diminutive 10ppm personal lasers. Of all the printers in its considerable arsenal, its biggest seller by far is the LaserJet 4100 series...

Mono laser printer

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.

Samsungs new entry into the laser printer market isnt as intimidating as its rough exterior looks.

For a laser printer manufacturer, GCC has an unusual history. Formed in 1981, the company originally developed enhancements for coin-operated video games such as Ataris Missile Command and also brought us PacMan.

Despite the recent flood of low-priced, high-quality inkjet printers, theres been comparatively little movement on the budget laser front, with Kyoceras FS-1000 (reviewed issue 34, p85) dominating our A-List since September last year.

Workgroup Office Laser Printer

Mono Laser Printer