Buying Guide: Color Lasers for Small Offices

No matter how much you rely on e-mail and document files instead of paper, the inevitable fact of office life is that everyone needs to print. In most offices, small or large, that means printing a lot, which in turn means you need the speed you can get only from a laser printer.

When you think of lasers, you probably think of monochrome printers first, but it's getting harder to ignore color. With prices for color lasers coming down and starting at just $300, any small office can afford one—even a busy home office. And unlike early color lasers, today's printers don't cost more per page than monochrome lasers when printing in monochrome. Unless you literally never need color, color lasers are the preferred choice for a small office with only one printer.
When you're shopping for a laser, keep in mind that although some printers in the laser category technically aren't lasers, they perform just as well as laser printers. Instead of using a laser, such printers have a different light source—an LED—and are sometimes referred to as such. Either way, all you need to know is that they are essentially identical to lasers for all practical purposes.

As with any printer, speed is an important ­issue. Comparing speeds, however, isn't always easy. Some color lasers print all four toner colors in one pass. Others print one color at a time, meaning that they need four passes for each page when printing. Which printer will be faster in real-world use depends on what types of jobs you regularly print. If you print mostly monochrome pages, the four-pass printer will be swiftest overall. But if you print mostly in color, the single-pass printer will be faster.
Also, be sure to examine the paper-handling capa­bilities of any printer you're considering, ­including options you can add later if your needs grow. Of course, the less often you fill paper trays, the better. If your printing averages 50 sheets a day, a 250-sheet paper tray will hold enough for about a week. If you average more than that, you'll probably want a higher capacity. Also look for a multipurpose tray to let you load a second kind of paper, like letterhead or envelopes, without having to touch the main tray. You may also want to decide whether you need a duplexer, a feature that makes printing double-sided pages easy.

Finally, choosing a connection for the printer is simple but important. If only one person in your office needs to print, a USB connection—which any printer should offer—is just fine. For those who have a home or office network, however, and need to print from more than one computer, an Ethernet network connection is the best choice. And with today's installation routines, installing a printer to operate over a network is usually no harder than setting it up to run over a USB connection.