Best Color Laser Printer Reviews

Laser printers brought the home and office into the world of dektop publishing, with crisp, precise printouts of both text and graphics. The one letdown though has always been the black and white issue - laser printers could only print black, white, and grayscale - no color. For offices, this meant still having to use specialized printers for color overhead slides and handouts, and going to special print shops for brochures, reports, etc. that required color images, text, or graphics. The inkjet arose as the at-home solution to color printing, delivering near-photo quality prints, although leaving much to be desired when printing text, leaving you with less crisp and very smudgeable pages. And color photo prints require special paper (expensive) and use lots of color ink (also expensive for refills).

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With the advent and improvement of color laser printers over the last few years, there is finally an alternative. Now, for $500 or so and higher, you can put a color laser printer on your home or office desk. Higher-end models can cost upwards of $2000, although those are aimed at heavy office use environments printing 10s of thousands of copies per month. In general, color toner replacement cartridges can be expensive - in the case of the low-end color laser printers, costing almost as much as the printer itself.

Ricoh Aficio CL4000DN and Samsung CLP-510N Color Laser Printers

Ricoh extends it graphics and printing capabilities with the Aficio CL4000, coming it an $1200. This is an office printer, capable of printing more than 100,000 page per month without batting an eye. It is larger, weighing more than 100 pounds - not something you want to try carrying all around the office. It has a 650 page sheet feeder and can handle duplex printing as well. This is a fast printer, with good text quality output but only medium graphics printing for printers of this class - still find for normal business use though, just not great for printing out picture perfect photos for competitions. Samsung seems to produce just about every kind of electronic gear these days, and the CLP-510N Laser printer is a mid-range entry at just under $500. It's a larger 70 lb. unit, with easy USB connectivity. Graphics and photos tends to show some dithering. Not our first choice.

HP Color Laserjet 2600n

At the low end of the color laser printer spectrum is the HP Color Laserjet 2600n and the Konica Minolta magicolor 2430DL, coming in at $399 and $499 list respectively. The HP is designed for home use - not a 10,000 page per day office. It comes with a network card (more expensive printers have the network interface built into the printer) and weighs in at just over 40 lbs - not quite like that 4 lb inkjet printer you might have lying around. It comes with preinstalled color toner cartridges (4), although the starter cartridges do not contain as much toner as the replacements you will be forced to buy later - they are really "starters". Of course the printed output is what counts when evaluating printers. The HP not surprisingly spits out perfect text, while graphics and photos are good for this price range and not far behind some of the more expensive printers - however they WILL NOT compare to inkjet prints on photo paper. The Konica 2430 DL comes with a four pass engine and can spit out almost 20 pages per minute. It comes with PictBridge support allowing you to print images directly from a digital camera, a nice feature but one that seldom comes up in real life. However, its print quality on both text and photos is excellent, making it a good value for the price.

Brother, Minolta, Xerox, Okidata, Panasonic Color Laser Printers

There are a bunch of other makers of color laser printers. When in doubt, make a trip down to Office Depot or BestBuy or Circuit City and check out some side by side comparisons. Nothing beats holding up a few pages of test prints, side by side, and see what you prefer. Everyone has different needs for a printer - if text is your top priority you may well pick a printout that is not the highest rated or popular overall printer. If you are interested mostly in home printing color photos, stick with the inkjet for now as the quality and costs (especially initial costs) will be lower.

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