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Minolta focuses on the printing needs of small offices with the release of the PagePro 1250E, a petite-form-factor monochrome laser printer capable of churning out up to 17 pages per minute.

The 1250E carries an estimated street price of $299, but it offers features normally found on office printers that sell for significantly more, according to the company. That boast seems to hold up in comparing the as-yet-untested 1250E to comparable printers on the small-office laser printer side of PCWorld.com's Top 10 Printers chart.

Features include 1200-by-1200-dpi resolution and three different printer emulations: PCL 6, PCL 5E, and PostScript Level 2. (Software printer emulations let you print documents that were originally intended for a different specific software and printer.)

Another selling point: The 1250E's dainty footprint (15.32 inches wide by 17.36 inches deep by 10.2 inches high) won't take up much space in a small, cramped office.

Big Duty

Despite its small size, the 1250E can process a respectable amount of output. Minolta rates it at 15,000 prints per month. The unit can hold 250 sheets of paper; an optional $149 add-on cassette raises its carrying capacity to 750 sheets.

For use as a single-PC printer, the 1250E offers two connections: a parallel interface and a USB interface. Minolta expects, however, that many small offices will use the printer on a network, and the unit can accept either wired or wireless network adapters from third-party manufacturers.

Minolta says that handling print jobs from multiple PCs shouldn't be a problem for the 1250E, claiming that the machine can print 17 letter-size pages per minute.

Copier, Too

For small offices that occasionally need to make copies but don't want to buy a separate device, Minolta offers yet another add-on to the 1250E--the SC-110 Digital Copier/Scanner for light copy work. You connect the unit--which has an estimated street price of $400--to the 1250E's parallel interface, and it accepts documents up to 8.5 inches by 14 inches in size. The SC-110 also supports reductions, enlargements, and half-tone documents, and offers multiple copy functions. It includes a 25-sheet, 10-ppm automatic document feeder.

Of course, by the time you've decked the 1250E out with all the trimmings, this inexpensive small-office printer costs upward of $850--and that's before you add a networking card.

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