Personal colour lasers

Dave Bayon | Aug 14, 2006 2:36 PM
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.
Products in this Group
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.Each review features four star ratings: Performance, Features & Design, Value for Money and a final Overall rating. They are calculated using a complicated mix of performance tests, objective scores and subjective quality ratings.

Performance (speed and quality)
The Performance rating is an equally weighted combination of print quality and speed. The speed tests are designed to test manufacturers’ claims as well as find out how each printer copes with different types of document. We print a 50-page Word file consisting of pages with 5% toner coverage (the “average” office document) for testing mono speed. We print an A4 mono letter with a colour logo to test colour speed. We also time how quickly the first colour and mono pages emerge, since many documents are only one page long.

Quality is judged independently by two members of the team. We print the same colour photomontage we use to test inkjets to find out how each printer copes with photos. Our 23-page Word document has a multitude of font sizes, greyscale bands and a selection of colour images. Here, we look for accurate colour reproduction and text quality.

We then print five copies of a four-page PDF file, an image-heavy document consisting of both mono and colour text. The final tests are a 12-page colour Excel workbook and a mono quality sheet, which has high-resolution images, fades, a range of font sizes and fine lines.

All tests are timed from the moment the first page is taken from the tray until the last page lands in the output tray. The exception is the time-to-first-page tests, which are timed from clicking OK to when the page drops onto the output tray, when the printer is in a “warm” state.

Features & Design
The Features & Design rating includes connectivity, duplex capabilities, driver and software functions and front-panel features. We also give points to warranties and the amount of toner initially included with each printer.

Value for Money
This rating is calculated using a weighted average of the Performance and Features & Design scores. We factor in price (including delivery) and then convert
the result to give a bang-per-buck rating out of six.

Overall
The Overall rating is a straight average of the Performance, Features & Design and Value for Money scores.

























































































 Brother HL-2700CNCanon LaserEpson AcuLaserHP Colour LaserJet 2605dnKonica Minolta magicolor 2450Lexmark C522nOki C3400nSamsung CLP-510Xeroz Phaser 6120N
12-page Excel866889778
5% mono letter1010101091010810
23-page Word DTP81061088699
20-page PDF88810710967
Photomontage987779667
Mono quality sheet7107977678