Melissa Riofrio

The $400 (as of May 22, 2012) Brother MFC-9125CN stands out among other low-cost color laser multifunction printers for having decent speed and toner costs. Though this MFP is unremarkable otherwise, it's a legitimate option for a small office seeking an inexpensive print/copy/scan/fax machine.

The MFC-9125CN's engine uses an LED array instead of the more traditional laser, and the MFP comes with 64MB of RAM, expandable to 576MB total. While its monthly duty cycle is a midrange 25,000 pages, the more realistic print volume (per Brother) is 300 to1500 pages per month--a low to moderate figure for a small office.

If you get the feeling that the cost of replacing the ink cartridges on your inkjet printer is getting out of hand, your impression may be more accurate than you realize. Between 2009 and today, the rate of inflation has increased by 7 percent. During that same period, the cost per page of some vendors' inks has risen by anywhere from 4 percent to 30 percent. Yes, 30 percent.

We review 50 or more printers per year, and we price the cartridges for every one of them. About 8 months ago, I began noticing that ink cartridge prices for some models were going up--sometimes sharply. When I dug deeper, I also saw that the price increases seemed to be selective: Some inks went up; others stayed the same; and one even dipped slightly. The biggest hikes I observed came from Lexmark and Kodak, but Epson's color ink costs have been rising as well. Meanwhile, HP seems to be nudging ink costs upward in its newer models.

If you're looking for a low-priced color laser printer for your small office, look again: For a mere $150 (as of May 1, 2012), you can obtain high-speed, good-quality color printing with HP's Officejet Pro 8100 ePrinter. This classily-styled color inkjet printer has Wi-Fi, USB, and ethernet, and it can handle up to 1250 pages of printing per month. Most important, its inks are cheaper per page than the toner supplies from any comparably priced color laser.

Setting up the Officejet Pro 8100 on a PC is simple: Insert the CD and follow the prompts. If you're using a Mac that runs Lion (OS X 10.7), however, you'll probably have to surf to HP's website for the latest drivers; the ones on our installation CD didn't support Apple's latest and greatest. You can use OS X's own Add Printer function to find the driver, but HP should bring its installation software up-to-date.

I lot of headlines this week proclaimed that Intel's new Ivy Bridge processors actually run a lot hotter than the Sandy Bridge processors they're set to replace. The truth is not that simple. We'll break it down for you in the podcast.

We also discuss the merits of Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 690 graphics card, which is essentially two GeForce GTX 680 cards for the price of...well...two.

Canon’s Pixma MX892 Wireless Inkjet Office All-In-One color inkjet multifunction printer (for printing, copying, faxing, and scanning) is suitable for a home or very small office. It delivered good output quality in our tests, and supports both automatic duplex printing and scanning, for a reasonable $200 (as of April 27, 2012). It's also handsome, solidly built, and moderately fast. Among its shortcomings are an awkward control panel and an absence of high-yield replacement ink cartridges, which other office-minded models in the same price range make available.

Setting up the PixmaMX892 is easy; and the MFP supports USB, ethernet, and Wi-Fi connectivity. You can set up Wi-Fi via WPS, though the 3-inch LCD gives you the option of selecting a network and entering a password to accomplish the same setup. Canon bundles its Solution Menu EX software, a capable package that handles everything from photo albums to scanning. You may push-scan to your computer from the PixmaMX892's control panel or offload scans via USB/PictBridge, Memory Stick, Secure Digital, or Compact Flash media. You may also print directly from media inserted into these ports.

Buying the inkjet printer or inkjet MFP (multifunction printer) that is best suited to your budget should be simple. It's not--and the complication is the ink. Replenishing this vital fluid costs much more over time than the printer itself costs initially, yet unwary buyers often overlook that expense. To find the most economical printer over the long haul, you need to pay attention to ink-onomics--how much your printer's inks cost and how much ink you'll use.

The first law of ink-onomics: The cheaper the printer, the more expensive its inks. We've tracked the prices of 56 inkjet MFPs over the past two years, and the average cost per page for inks destined for a cheap printer (which we define as one costing less than $200) has consistently been higher than that for an expensive printer (one costing $200 or more).

The Kodak Hero 3.1 color inkjet multifunction printer offers a lot of bang for the buck. At only $100 (as of April 2, 2012) this copying/printing/scanning device produces exceptionally nice photos, and its inexpensive inks make it cheaper to operate than other MFPs in its price range. Kodak also provides some elegant software, though it suffered from a glitch in our testing.

We miss the Kodak-gold highlighting of older models, but the Hero 3.1 is a competent-looking unit that appears to be reasonably well built. Its paper-handling features are strictly low-volume: a 100-sheet rear vertical feed, manual-only duplexing, and no automatic document feeder. Disappointingly, for a unit that lacks an ADF, the scanner lid (for letter/A4-size paper) doesn't telescope to accommodate thicker documents.

Not all printer ink is created equal. Some of it lasts a long time, some of it goes quickly. Prices vary wildly. Who's ripping you off on ink, and who's providing a better value? Where does quality fit into the picture? Printing expert Melissa Riofrio lets us know who's giving you the best deals on printer ink.

Did you hear the Nokia Lumia 900 is about to hit the market? Reviews are mixed - almost everyone, including our own Ginny Mies - has a lot of nice things to say about the phone, especially given its highly affordable price. Everyone also has a handful of gripes that really sour the experience.

If you buy a cheap inkjet printer, you're going to pay a small fortune for the ink to run it (assuming that you use the ink that its manufacturer specially designed for it). Even so, the size of the bill depends to a great extent on which brand of printer you buy. Some printer makers, like Kodak, work hard to keep their ink prices reasonable, while others, like Dell, consistently charge top dollar.

When you look at as many inkjet printers and multifunction printers as I do--about 40 per year, representing about half of the total number of models currently available from major vendors--you start to see trends in ink pricing. I maintain a dynamic average of ink costs that shifts as I add new printers to the list and retire old ones. The averages have remained fairly stable over the past few years: For standard-size ink cartridges, which generally yield about 250 pages or less, the average price per page is about 4.8 cents for pages that use only black ink, and it's about 13.8 cents for prints that use all four colors. High-yield cartridges have more ink and print more pages--in some cases, thousands more pages--and like most bulk purchases, they cost less in the long run. The average costs for large, high-yield cartridges are about 3.4 cents per page for black and 10.4 cents for a page with all four colors.

Why should your small office buy a low-end color laser for $400 to $500 when you could opt for the $150 (as of March 25, 2012) Epson Workforce Pro WP-4020 color inkjet printer instead? Good question, especially when you compare it to models like the $450 HP Laserjet Pro 400 Color M451nw. The Workforce Pro WP-4020 offers superior speed and color graphics, near-laser-quality text, and more features, plus a significantly lower price per page.

The Workforce Pro WP-4020 sports USB, ethernet, and Wi-Fi connections. Installation is straightforward, though the display-free, minimal control panel means that you must connect via USB or ethernet to set up the Wi-Fi. The control panel provides buttons for power, cancel, Wi-Fi off/on, and the cleaning routines for the black and color printheads. There are also low-ink warning lights. The print driver dialog is nicely laid out and easy to understand.

The HP Officejet 6700 Premium e-All-in-One color inkjet multifunction (print/scan/copy/fax) offers many impressive capabilities, especially considering its affordable price of just $170 (as of March 28, 2012). Geared toward the needs of a midvolume home or small office (printing dozens, not hundreds, of pages per week), the Officejet 6700 Premium performs quickly and produces decent text and photos. Its inks, especially colors, are affordable in their high-yield versions.

The OfficeJet 6700 Premium is a triple treat, interface-wise: USB, ethernet, and Wi-Fi are all present. Setup is easy, and the software is the usual competent but easy-to-use HP suite, including optical character recognition.

The Epson WorkForce Pro WP-4540 ($400 as of February 22, 2012) does most everything (copying/faxing/printing/scanning) well, but it faces stiff competition in the business inkjet multifunction category. Put another way: It's fast, but not the fastest; it produces great output, but nothing beyond what other models generate; and it's cheap to operate, though no cheaper than its rivals. Said rivals fully support legal-size documents, however, and the WorkForce Pro WP-4540 falls a little short there.

One genuinely appealing, unique-in-class feature is the WorkForce Pro WP-4540's 80-sheet rear vertical, multipurpose feed. It eliminates the 180-degree turn that sheets from the trays must suffer, so it can accommodate thicker media such as photo paper or envelopes. It also accommodates legal-size paper, as do the two 250-sheet input trays. Together, they make the WorkForce Pro WP-4540's input capacity a generous 580 sheets. You'll also find an automatic duplexer for two-sided printing (though it's not the driver default).