A printer for all reasons: we fire up 12 laser printers to produce the perfect page - includes related product-comparison chart - Buyers Guide

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1997 by Joey Latimer

Let's face it -- for text documents, you need a laser printer. A whole slew of impressive-looking ink-jet printers is on the market now, beckoning us into the world of both black-and-white and color printing. Yet as enticing as these products are, nothing beats the clarity and sharpness of text documents produced by a laser printer. Choosing the perfect laser printer for your office is much like choosing a car. You wouldn't want to pile six kids into a two-seat sports car to take them to school each day, and you probably don't want to buy a 12-seat van with a V-8 engine to commute 30 miles to work by yourself. In the same way, choosing a laser printer should be a matter of evaluating your current and projected workloads and matching that with the appropriate printer. To help you decide, we reviewed 12 laser printers and divided them into three primary user classes: single user, multiuser, and high-volume user. Because there are so many printers within each of these classes, we chose to depart from our usual review format and present the information in chart form.

The single-user printers we chose all sell for a street price of $400 or less (with the exception of the $849 Apple LaserWriter 4/600 PS), have a print speed rating of four or six pages per minute (ppm), and print with a resolution of 600 dots per inch (dpi). They are designed primarily to be used with a personal computer and print, at most, a few thousand pages each month. These are excellent units for basic correspondence, mailings, fliers, advertisements, or check printing. They generally have a paper input capacity of around 100 sheets and a toner capacity of 2,000 to 4,000 sheets. Try to print 10,000 fliers a week on one of these puppies, and you'll probably be disappointed.

For the multiuser category, we chose more rugged printers, in the $399 to $950 and 8 to 10ppm ranges. These models generally hold more paper (200-plus sheets) and are designed to output more pages each month than the single-user printers. They have the muscle to stand up to the workload of power users, multiple users, or small networks.

High-volume printers are designed for printing thousands of pages each month. These units really shine when they are connected to a network of computers and users. The three we chose are in the $799 to $1,539 ran e and are all rated at 12ppm. They each have a toner capacity of at least 6,000 sheets and print at either 600 or 1,200dpi. By connecting directly to a network, they are available to all the users at the same time and maintain excellent speed. Hook a single-user printer to a network file server, start sending multiple jobs to it, and you'll see (by all the people waiting for their jobs) why a high-volume printer can help speed things up tremendously.

We tested the printers by setting them up in a typical office situation and running a series of jobs. This included printing and timing text documents, as well as 600dpi line art and grayscale graphics jobs. We were looking for ease of setup and use, speed, and quality of print. The results of our tests (see "Comparing Foxes and Bricks" on the page following our charts) should make it easier to choose the best printer for your situation.