Color Fast

As color laser printers have dropped in price, more people have begun to wonder whether they'd make a good replacement for the old standby monochrome lasers. And the printer companies say their color lasers can match the text quality of monochrome units; they even claim that many of them print color documents as quickly as they do text. To put these claims to the test, we revved up our network to see which printers could keep a busy office happy--and deliver the print quality required for important business documents.

We looked at 13 models, ranging from a $799 Oki Data unit that you could transport in the front seat of your car, to printers weighing 150 pounds or more. We judged them on speed and print quality, operating costs, paper-handling options, ease of setup and operation, and management tools.

Most of the color lasers that we reviewed cost between $1900 and $3000--much more than monochrome laser models, but still not an outrageous capital investment for a workgroup device. We found a number of color printers that matched the crisp black text--and neared the speed--of a good corporate monochrome laser. Plenty of these printers deliver color quality that's even adequate for reproducing photos, if you're not terribly picky. Hewlett-Packard's Color LaserJet 5500n did the best on color photos among our test set. The Xerox Phaser 6250N and Brother HL-4200CN (two versions of the same printer) were among the weaker models on print quality.

Several trends in color laser technology cropped up in this batch of printers. Single-pass printing--in which paper runs through a straight path one time--was a curiosity a few years ago; most printers used a four-pass system, in which a document essentially went through four sequential print jobs. A single-pass design requires fewer moving parts, so the printer suffers fewer malfunctions. Single-pass printers are faster than the previous generation of four-pass printers, though the one four-pass printer we tested, the Samsung CLP-500N, turned in roughly average speeds. One potential drawback of single-pass printers is that they're bulkier than four-pass models. Another trend to note: If you need to make big prints, you'll be happy to learn that more wide-format printers have entered the market as prices for color lasers have dropped.

Compare color laser printers