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Laser printers used to cost significantly more than midrange ink jet printers. But prices are now dipping below the $200 mark, the latest example being Lexmark's E210 personal laser jet printer.

Geared toward small businesses and consumers, the $199 E210 is Lexmark's first sub-$200 monochrome laser printer. Its print speed is rated at a relatively speedy 12 pages per minute. However, toner refills will set you back $80 per cartridge for every 2000 pages of text, which brings the total cost of printing one page to 4 cents.

The hardware price drop also comes with a few feature compromises. For example, the E210 ships with a fixed 4MB of memory and cannot be networked. The latter omission will be a disappointment if you want to share a printer with multiple PCs.

You get these functions with Lexmark's Optra E312L, priced slightly higher at $260. The E312L is a network-friendly printer, and supports memory upgrades to 66MB. As a rule, the more memory the printer has installed, the faster it can process and print documents.

Lasers Lure With Low Prices

How can laser printer prices drop when the cost of building a laser printer stays flat?

"Printer manufacturers are almost willing to give the hardware away," says Bob Hochella, senior analyst with Lyra Research. That's because they hope to earn larger profits on aftermarket sales of print toner, Hochella says.

Lexmark is following an industry-wide trend of vendors dropping prices to win you over as a customer, he says. Similar attractively priced laser printers are marketed by Minolta, which offers its PagePro 1100 L for $249, and Samsung, with its $199 ML-4500.

The Lexmark E210 supports resolutions as high as 600 by 600, and can connect out of the box to either a parallel or Universal Serial Bus port. The E210's input capacity is 150 sheets; its output capacity is 100 sheets. It can print envelopes, labels, transparencies, and card stock.

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