Q: My office has a laser printer, and I love the way the pages look. Are there affordable versions for the home?
A: It’s true that laser printers were once big, bulky and expensive, but the prices have come down as much as their dimensions have. The HP Color LaserJet 2550L (hp.com; $499) is aimed at small businesses and consumers looking to do a lot of printing. It has a speedy processor and 64 megabytes of memory, so your PC won’t get bogged down in the middle of a print job. If you’re willing to settle for black-and-white copies, another company, Brother, has even managed to crack the $300 barrier with the HL-5140 laser printer (brother.com; $230). It’s not as quiet as the pricier models, but it can spit out 21 pages per minute, it comes with 16 megabytes of base memory (upgradeable to a whopping 144 megabytes) and it’s compatible with both PCs and Macs.
If I buy an ink-jet printer, will the pages look as good as those from a laser printer?
Ink-jet printers, too, have come a long way in the past decade. Gone are the blurry images, smeared type and distorted colors. At the high end, Xerox recently introduced the first solid-ink printer, the Xerox 8400B (xerox.com; $1,000). It’s slower than a color laser printer, but surprisingly the images are much clearer. Most ink-jet printers, though, will cost you less than $200. But be sure to check to see whether the black-ink cartridge is separate from the color-ink cartridges, because unless you’re printing photos only, you’ll tend to use basic black more often. If the cartridges aren’t separate, you’ll have to replace all the inks even though you’re running low only on black. You should also check on the cost of the ink cartridges before you purchase the printer, because affordable printers are generally accompanied by expensive cartridges.
I print a lot of pictures, and I’m trying to decide between an ink-jet printer and a dedicated photo printer. What advantages does the latter offer?
Neither ink-jet printers nor their laser counterparts truly reproduce the look of an actual photograph the way that dedicated photo printers can. The Olympus P-10 Digital Photo Printer (olympus.com; $179) is a cube-shaped “dye-sublimation” printer that produces true photo-quality 4-by-6 or 3.5-by-5 borderless prints in well under a minute using heat-transferred inks. You can hook it up to your PC via USB, but the Olympus P-10 also uses a technology called PictBridge that allows you to connect it directly to any compatible digital camera–in other words, you don’t need a PC to serve as the middleman.
I’d like to conserve space in my home office with an all-in-one printer-copier-scanner. Will I be sacrificing quality by doing so?
It used to be that a multifunction printer did everything OK and nothing especially well. Not anymore. We really like the Canon MultiPASS MP730 (canon.com; $300), a fast color ink-jet machine that scans, copies, faxes and prints both text and pictures. It also has slots for a variety of flash memory cards, including CompactFlash, SD, MultiMediaCard and Memory Stick.
What if I only need to print labels? Do I still need to buy a regular printer?
Not at all. Why run off a full sheet of paper just to print a single label or two? The Brother P-Touch QL-500 Label Printer (brother.com; $170) produces sharp text and graphics directly onto Dura-coated paper labels that are ideal for addresses, folders or even name badges for your next party. And if you’d like to add a personal touch to that mix CD or DVD, take a look at the Epson R200 Printer (epson.com; $99), which uses six-color photo-dye cartridges and can print directly onto compatible CDs or DVDs.
