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Take Advantage of Your Printer's Hidden Extras

Because virtually all current monochrome lasers produce professional-looking text, and most run at similar speeds, printer makers have to find other means to distinguish their products. What differentiates the newest lasers from their competition? In a word, features.

Following are a few of the most useful extras now available on certain office printers. Some of these options make ordinary chores more convenient, while others let you perform tasks that would otherwise be impossible. To gain optimum efficiency from your printer, it's wise to determine which models have the features your office needs.

Watermarks: When you circulate preliminary documents for comment, you don't want anyone to mistake your inspired but half-developed ideas for a final report. In the old days, people labeled drafts with rubber stamps and red ink. Most of the printers we reviewed can superimpose text--called a watermark--on your documents. The printer driver's watermark settings generally provide canned text strings ("Top Secret") and let you create new ones ("Molly in Accounting"). Most drivers' watermark settings let you place the watermark at any angle, anywhere on the page--so you could make it small and put it in a corner. A few drivers, however, can only plop it in the middle.

Separator sheets: By the time you walk to the printer to pick up your document, it's probably buried in a stack of print jobs. To make it easier to find, Xerox's DocuPrint N2125 can insert separator sheets between jobs, with information about who created each document. This arrangement works well if you can devote a paper tray to colored paper for these sheets.

Fax friendliness: Xerox's N2125 also includes a "fax-friendly" setting. Gray-scale graphics such as logos, charts, and photos often come through unreadable when they're faxed because the printer's dots don't mesh well with the dots that the fax machines capture when they scan. The fax-friendly setting creates patterns that a fax machine can more easily register. The output doesn't look great, but it faxes better than a typical gray-scale image, and your recipient is more likely to make sense of it.

Internal storage: Several printer capabilities require either flash memory or an internal hard drive. (If your machine has either of those options, chances are it can perform the tricks described below.) First, a printer with its own storage can keep your office's font library onboard, thereby reducing network traffic--fonts don't have to travel with each document. Similarly, you can create templates of frequently printed documents (usually called overlays) and store them on the printer. Of the printers we reviewed, the Brother models, the Xerox N2125, the IBM Infoprint 21, the Lexmark T614N, the Ricoh AP-1600, and the Samsung ML-7300N offer optional storage.

Overlays are especially practical for forms, which often have complex backgrounds that remain unchanged, and some simple data fields that change with each version. When you print a stored form, the driver sends just the data and tells the printer which overlay to use; this reduces the time the printer takes to render and then print the document.

Another use for onboard storage: Before printing a confidential document, you can give it a password. The printer processes the document and stores it until you enter the password at the control panel. A variation on the process-and-hold feature (available on the Xerox N2125, the HP 4100n, and the Lexmark T614N) lets you examine a single page or copy of a document before running the whole job.

Printer agent: Nobody has time to hang around the printer replenishing supplies and clearing jams. But if the print job ahead of yours uses up all the paper, your document will sit in limbo until someone refills the tray. The best solution is to set up the printer to notify someone via e-mail about maintenance issues that need attention.

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