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Though not as glamorous as the latest tiny PDA (or even a new color printer), that trusty, dust-covered black-and-white laser printer in the corner is the workhorse that keeps your organization going. But as your business expands, your workload can outgrow the printer that's served it faithfully. And if you haven't shopped for a new printer in a while, you'll find that monochrome laser printers aren't the dull plodders you expected: They're faster, print better, and have productivity-enhancing features and options that probably weren't available the last time you looked.

Picking the Right Printer

When you start thinking about a new laser for your office, price is probably your first concern. Before you decide, though, also consider the size and needs of your office or workgroup.

Amount of traffic: Will the printer serve one person or ten? Do you usually print 100 pages a month or 1000? Once you have determined how much traffic your printer must handle, you'll be able to figure out which models are best suited to meet your needs--a fairly inexpensive unit such as our small-office Best Buy, the $249 Minolta-QMS PagePro 1100L, or a relatively full-featured printer like our corporate Best Buy, the $1299 Xerox DocuPrint N2125, whose paper-handling features can adapt to almost any office.

A printer's speed becomes more important as workgroups get larger. A printer can process complex files with lots of graphics or nonresident fonts much faster if it has adequate memory; if your workgroup produces graphics-rich documents and reports, buying a unit with extra memory could give you very cheap insurance against bottlenecks. Most workgroup printers can generate a regular status sheet that identifies the number of pages printed. Before you settle on a new printer, consider printing and dating several status sheets to obtain a rough idea of how much paper traffic your printer must handle.

Paper capacity: If you're part of a workgroup, consider how much paper you've used in the past. Do you run out every few days? Adding paper trays may do the trick, or you may want to get a higher-capacity printer, like the Lexmark Optra T614N, which can hold over 2800 sheets with optional trays in place. Or you might choose to reorganize your printer workgroups altogether: It may be cost-effective to divide your print workload by buying two slower, cheaper printers instead of one top-of-the-line machine.

Print quality: The business documents you send to people outside your organization must have a sharp, authoritative look, whereas your colleagues may not mind a few smudges on copies intended just for them. Either way, just about all the printers we tested produce clean, precise text that looks great on almost any business document. Gray-scale print quality, on the other hand, varies noticeably among the printers we compared. If you plan to use your monochrome laser for page-layout proofs or photos, pay close attention to graphics print quality.

Features: Flexibility separates today's printers from the old-timers. Laser printer makers are differentiating their products with timesaving standard features and options. Printing envelopes, for example, used to mean standing at the printer and hand-feeding each envelope--a time-waster that you can eliminate by using a mechanical envelope feeder, available on seven of the corporate printers we reviewed.

Laser printers that come with standard or optional hard drives can perform timesaving tricks as well. When printing financial reports or complex forms containing large bitmaps, you can decrease printing time by creating overlays--preprocessed images you store on the printer's hard drive to combine with smaller files that you send for each document.

And have you ever sent a confidential document to your workgroup's printer and gone to retrieve it, only to find that someone else had already walked off with it? A few models come with drivers that let you store a password to complete printing a document when you're standing at the printer. To learn more about password protection and other advanced features available on new printers, see "Tap the Power."

We sought out state-of-the-art monochrome office lasers suitable for a variety of workgroups. The PC World Test Center benchmarked 13 new monochrome lasers, ranging from single-user printers to units that can serve large workgroups, and matched these against 16 previously tested models. Then we picked our 5 favorite lasers for the small-office environment and our top 5 corporate machines. Read on for individual reviews of these printers, and check our features comparison chart for buying information and more details.

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