Color Lasers Get Down to Business
Our lab tests reveal the best bargains among the latest low-cost color laser printers.Eric Butterfield
Standing tall: Dell's 3100cn (left) comes standard with an extra paper tray, making it tower over the less-expensive Oki C3200n.
It's hardly a challenge any longer to find a color laser printer for as little as $399. All six models we tested this month cost less than $1000, and all are faster and deliver better print quality than previous units we have tested. Nor do these office workhorses skimp on features: They come network-capable, often with two paper trays so you can keep a second paper stock (such as company letterhead) loaded and ready.
Our Best Buy may appear somewhat familiar, since it's a close cousin of the last chart's top-seeded printer. The $499 Dell 3100cn looks and behaves much like our earlier Best Buy, the discontinued Dell 3000cn, but adds a second paper tray and drivers for Apple and Linux OSs. The two Dells turned in almost identical speeds in our tests, printing text at 17.8 pages per minute--more than 5 ppm faster than the average for all previously tested models.
If blisteringly fast print speeds are your top priority, however, your best choice is Oki Printing Solutions' $799 C5800Ldn. This new model was the swiftest printer across the board, printing text at a rapid 19.5 ppm, color graphics at a brisk 6.1 ppm, and glossy photos at 6.1 ppm.
Better Prints
The last time we evaluated low-cost color lasers (for our December 2005 issue), print quality was a decidedly mixed bag. Our new crop of printers delivered better quality, on average, in all categories.
The Dell 3100cn earned an unprecedented three Superior scores--for text, line art, and grayscale graphics quality--marking the first time we've awarded a color laser our top score in any print quality category. The 3100cn's color print scores were closer to average, however: Graphics on plain paper had slightly fuzzy details, and skin tones in photos looked unnaturally orange.
Three other new models received Superior scores, each in a different area. Though it failed to make the chart, the $999 Konica Minolta MagiColor 5440 DL achieved its high mark for razor-sharp text. Oki Printing Solutions' $399 C3200n, which placed third, produced an almost flawless line-art print. And Lexmark's $699 C524n aced our grayscale graphics test, but missed our chart in part due to its high price.
The ability to print on glossy paper specifically designed for use with laser units is a relatively new feature for color laser printers, but all six of the models we tested this month have it. The average print speed on glossy paper was lethargic, though, at 1.8 ppm.
The quality of glossy photo prints from a color laser falls significantly short of what you'd get from a good inkjet printer, too. Five of the ten models on the chart earned a rating of Poor for photo print quality; most other models earned only a Fair. Colors tended to look unnatural, depth and details frequently got lost, and textures that should have looked smooth were often marred by visible dots or cross-hatch patterns.
The compact HP Color LaserJet 3800n is easy to maintain.
Still, if you plan to print business brochures--and not photo-quality images--on glossy paper, most of these models should fit your needs. Unlike inkjet printers, color lasers don't produce better print quality on glossy paper; our photos looked identical whether they were on plain or glossy paper. Interestingly, the highest print quality score went to Dell's 3100cn, a model that doesn't claim to print on glossy paper at all. We tried it anyway with Hammermill Color Laser Gloss paper, and the results were surprising: The 3100cn generated the most attractive glossy photos we've seen from a sub-$1000 color laser printer.
The mediocre photo image quality that these color lasers produced helps explain why only a few printers in this class can print photos directly from a digital camera. In fact, Konica Minolta's MagiColor 2430DL is the only printer on the chart that comes standard with a PictBridge port.
To enable this optional feature on its sibling, the MagiColor 5440 DL, you would have to purchase a $249 card and an additional 128MB of RAM for $129. Whether the feature is worth the expense involved may depend on how willing you are to load your images onto a PC first: In the tests we conducted, the MagiColor 5440 DL took almost 5.5 minutes to print a 3.6MB file taken directly from a Canon PowerShot S80 camera onto a sheet of letter-size glossy paper. Of course, printing the same photo on letter-size paper via the direct-print feature on a Canon i9900 inkjet printer took just as long.
Setting up the latest color lasers is not difficult. The four new models that reached the chart are well designed, have a backlit two-line monochrome LCD, and make replacing the toner cartridges an easy task.
While all of the models we tested offer USB 2.0 and ethernet connectivity, only a handful support older connectivity and operating systems. For example, your options are somewhat limited if you require a parallel port: Just five printers on the chart, including our Best Buy and the number two Brother HL-2700CN, have a parallel port. Both of those printers also come with drivers for Windows NT, but the other three models that are new to the chart do not. Linux users are better served: Only the Oki C3200n and Brother HL-2700CN lack Linux drivers.
Breaking It Down
Even if you want to spend the bare minimum on a color laser printer, you can get a fair number of features and reasonably good image quality. For example, the Oki C3200n and the Dell 3100cn include paper-handling features similar to those on relatively expensive models, and both have an embedded Web server for remotely managing the printer. The Oki doesn't offer PCL or PostScript, however, while the Dell supports both.
In some cases the most significant trade-off you have to make in buying a relatively inexpensive model involves the options: For example, you can't get an additional paper tray for the $399 C3200n, and adding a duplexer and the required 64MB of extra memory costs $488, making the overall price higher than the $799 you'd pay for the much faster Oki C5800Ldn, which comes already equipped with a tray, duplexer, and extra memory.
Find the Very Latest Color Laser Printer Charts
Click on the links below for the latest online color laser printer rankings or a comprehensive list of all printers we've tested.
Top Color Laser Printers From the June 2006 Issue of PC World Magazine
