Printers for your business

Black and white

In the world of black and white, around £250 gets you a laser printer for a small workgroup. Although similar to personal lasers, these printers can crank through 8 to 13 pages per minute (ppm), and they have larger paper trays. You'll find printers in this category from major vendors, such as HP, Lexmark and, most recently, Dell. Other vendors with products in this market segment include Brother, Kyocera and Samsung.

The best way to share a printer such as this is to connect it to a machine that's always on (your server, for example) via a USB or parallel port and share it through the Windows printer-sharing system. Many models also offer an optional Ethernet card for direct network printing.

For heavier-duty printing needs, you'll want to consider a true workgroup printer such as the Xerox Phaser 4400N. Not only do these printers give you roughly double the speed of a high-end personal printer, they typically include built-in Ethernet support for direct network connections and multiple paper trays. If your office is constantly bogged down with people waiting for print jobs to finish, moving up to a workgroup printer, which costs about £750, is the way to go.

Colour

For limited colour printing, any good-quality inkjet should suffice. Avoid using an inkjet as your primary printer, though, since the quality of the output still doesn't match that of laser printers and even plain-black ink consumables tend to be more expensive than toner cartridges. The market is also flooded with sub-£100 inkjets, which you should avoid. But having a colour printer can be a godsend for avoiding expensive trips to a print shop to make colour copies or print one-offs of your latest Web site design.

You'll find models at several different prices from Canon, HP, Epson and Lexmark. Insist on a printer with a separate black ink cartridge and, for highest-quality prints, look for a printer that supports six-colour printing. Also keep in mind that there are now several colour laser printers that cost just less than £1,000, most notably HP's Color LaserJet 2500, making them viable for small businesses.

Multifunction devices

Lastly, if you're looking to save desk space by consolidating your printer with a scanner, a copier, and in some cases a fax machine, a multifunction device is a great alternative. Models are available with either colour-inkjet or laser printing, depending on your needs. Invest in a model that's based on a copier design, with a glass flatbed for scanning books and magazine, instead of a pass-through design more akin to that of a regular printer.

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		Product	Date	Editors' Rating	Readers' Rating
		Canon i80	[16 Feb 2004]	8.3	7.5
		Xerox Phaser 4400N	[05 Mar 2003]	8.5	6.0
		HP OfficeJet 9130 All-in-One	[24 May 2004]	7.8	6.8
		Xerox Phaser 8400B	[11 May 2004]	7.3	8.4
		HP LaserJet 3380	[06 May 2004]	8.0	6.7
		Product	Date	Editors' Rating	Readers' Rating