Group test: Budget colour laser printers

The price of colour laser printers continues to plummet. Two years ago we tested what were then budget models, ranging in price from £450 to £850.

Now for just over £200 you can buy a network-capable model that prints full A4 pages at up to eight pages per minute, without any of the hassle of constantly replacing tiny and expensive inkjet cartridges.

If your main requirement is for monochrome printing but you want to add the occasional colour job, there are printers that will churn out black and white pages at up to 30 pages per minute and deliver respectable colour performance for a shade over £300.

Today, we're so used to working with colour web pages, colour photographs and colour presentations that the benefits of colour printing are obvious. Many of us supplement our monochrome laser printer with an inkjet device for colour output.

However, with budget colour lasers approaching the price of high-end inkjets, why not combine your day-to-day colour and mono tasks into a single low-cost device?

As is always the case with printers, the cost of running them can be of vital importance, especially if you're planning on printing large volumes of output or charging a customer per print.

It's no coincidence that the printer which is cheapest to buy is also the most expensive to run. It also requires far more user intervention as its lower-capacity cartridges will need replacing more frequently.

Make sure you look at the price and capacities of all consumable items, not just toner, when deciding what to buy. We also cover this more in the Real cost of printing .

This is part of a group test on budget colour laser printers. Other articles are:

Canon Laser Shot LBP 5200
Dell 3100cn
Epson Aculaser C1100N
HP Color Laserjet 2600n
Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL
Lexmark C510n
Oki C3200
Xerox Phaser 6120
The Real Cost of Printing

Editor's Choice: page 2

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