Affordable colour laser printers

A few caveats

Why might you need a colour laser printer? They're perfect for sprucing up presentations, brochures and manuals and are an ideal choice if you want laser-quality monochrome output with the ability to print in colour. Plus, low-end colour lasers often produce colour output quality that rivals that of much more expensive printers.

Of course, you'll have to make some concessions for the lower price. Print speeds, particularly on colour documents, tend to be slower, since most sub-£1,000 models use an older technology, the three- or four-pass system. In other words, they print one colour, go back, print the second colour, and so on. By comparison, pricier colour lasers such as the Xerox Phaser 6250, which costs between £1,429 and £2,369 (ex. VAT), use a faster one-pass approach. Bargain colour lasers also have smaller paper trays and shorter duty cycles, and they lack workgroup essentials such as built-in networking capability.

You'll probably want to expand the printer's memory, too, or at least have the option to do so. Not all bargain colour lasers allow this. The Samsung CLP-500 comes with 64MB of RAM and is expandable to 92MB, whereas the HP Color LaserJet 1500L comes with only 16MB of RAM and no room for expansion -- bad news for workgroups.

Due diligence

You can add functionality to your low-end colour laser in the form of printer add-ons, but these extras can make your bargain colour laser downright pricey. You should scrutinise add-ons carefully. For example, the £671 (ex. VAT) HP Color LaserJet 1500L comes with a skimpy 125-sheet input tray; a 500-sheet-tray addition costs an extra £296 (yes, almost half of the printer price). In an office, LAN connectivity is a must. Like the 1500DL, the £465 (ex. VAT) Konica Minolta Magicolor 2300DL has a network interface, but its poorer cousin, the £349 (ex. VAT) Magicolor 2300W, doesn't.

Printing costs are slightly higher with the low-end models, too. For monochrome, they average about 1 pence per page, but run as high as 6p to 7p for colour output, compared to 5p to 6p per page on more expensive models. One way to cut printing costs is to purchase high-capacity toner cartridges. A high-capacity Magicolor colour cartridge (£83), for instance, is good for 4,500 pages -- three times the lifespan of the printer's £50 standard cartridge.

Another caveat: many bargain colour lasers, including the LaserJet 1500L, Magicolor 2300DL and 2300W, and the Samsung CLP-500, don't support the PostScript or PCL printer languages. This may pose a problem for corporate workgroups with legacy applications standardised on PostScript or PCL, but not for small offices that rely on the computer's (or Windows GDI) print language.

Will colour lasers continue to drop in price? Perhaps, but don't expect inkjet-style sub-£100 bargains anytime soon. With the low end already around £500, we're not complaining.

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		Product	Date	Editors' Rating	Readers' Rating
		HP Color LaserJet 2550L	[23 Sep 2004]	7.3	7.3
		Brother HL-2700CN	[14 Jun 2004]	7.5	5.0
		Samsung CLP-500	[09 Feb 2004]	7.7	7.7
		Xerox Phaser 6250DT	[10 Nov 2003]	7.8	7.6
		HP Colour LaserJet 1500L	[14 Aug 2003]	7.2	5.8
		Product	Date	Editors' Rating	Readers' Rating