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I thought I knew the two eternal truths about color printers: Ink jet printers have modest price tags but work slowly and consume lots of expensive supplies if you print more than a handful of pages a week. Color laser printers work quickly and meet the demands of heavier use, but at $2500 or more they're too expensive for most people or departments to consider. Then I got my hands on Hewlett-Packard's new 2000C, a color ink jet that wrote its own rules.

The $799 price may seem steep at first, but the 2000C looks to be a workhorse that will be a hit with individual power users and workgroups that can't justify a color laser. (HP also offers the 2000CN, a network-ready version.)

The printer gets its speed from four oversize printheads that can squirt a wide swath of ink onto the page in one pass. In my tests, performance was truly impressive: The 2000C took less than 2 minutes to print a ten-page text document, 50 seconds to produce a color presentation slide, and just over 2 minutes to reproduce a full-page photo. Better yet, it achieved those speedy print times without defaulting to low-resolution settings, as some fast printers do.

Overall, print quality for both text pages and color graphics was some of the best I've seen from an ink jet. Color photographs on HP's special paper were vivid and realistic. Although the 2000C is capable of handling the vast majority of typical office print jobs, I would still want access to a monochrome laser printer for my most important correspondence. No ink jet produces text that looks quite as crisp as the output of a 600-dots-per-inch laser.