Lab

Colour laser printers

Almost every family PC these days has a printer attached, and almost all of those are inkjets. Laser printers, meanwhile, are standard for business, churning out crisp black-and-white pages much faster than inkjets can manage.

A colour laser might seem like the best of both worlds, but until recently this option was much too expensive for home users and many small businesses.

That's now changing. For this group test, we found half a dozen colour lasers at prices that most users could consider. Several cost around £250 or less, while the cheapest model also turned out to be our winner.

The printers on test this month are still much more office-like than your typical inkjet. The Dell is the smallest and lightest, but - at 400x422x378mm in size and weighing 17kg - we wouldn't exactly call it svelte. As long as you're not too pushed for space, though, there's something quite reassuring about these bulky, photocopier-like units.

Colour laser printers offer a number of advantages over inkjets. First and foremost, despite their higher purchase prices, they could save you money. While it's not straightforward to work out the precise cost per page of output, at only a few pence for a full-colour sheet a colour laser generally beats an inkjet hands-down.

Another key advantage is speed. A laser printer works by creating a latent image of the page on a drum, then dipping it in finely powdered toner. This tends to be faster than the line-by-line process that builds up an inkjet page. Print the page more than once, and the laser really takes off. The image on the drum can be reprinted many times in rapid succession, much like a printing press churning out copies from the same plate. While the inkjet has to start all over again for each copy, the laser will fly through multiple pages.

Toner is stuck to the paper using static electricity before being fused permanently to it by heat. There's no ink to bleed into the surface, so the result is crisp even on porous paper. To get the best results from an inkjet, particularly with photos, you need special coated paper, which adds significantly to the cost per page. With a laser, you should get great results from standard copier paper. However, photos will lack the glossy appearance and almost invisibly fine grain of those from an inkjet, and overall you'd be much less likely to mistake them for a conventional photographic print. You wouldn't choose a laser if your main aim was to print photos, but colour pages are faster and cheaper to output, and graphics such as charts and clip-art will look bright and solid.

Finally, a key advantage of laser printers is that they can handle a much heavier workload. Compared to inkjets, lasers contain fewer and less delicate moving parts and are designed for a higher volume of output (sometimes referred to as their 'duty cycle'). Even for cheaper models, this is usually in the range of thousands of pages per month.

So much for the generalities. As usual, only hands-on testing will tell you what each model is really capable of and which offers the best value for money. Time to join our crew in the labs.