CRNTech: Seven best colour laser printers

Brother HL-4040CN

RRP: $599 Distributor: Synnex

Compared to the other printers here, the Brother HL-4040CN is the Rolls Royce of colour lasers. It isn't just the price or weight - although at 29kg it's the most expensive and heaviest here. It's beautifully built.

The superlatives continue with its paper handling. The main tray can hold 250 sheets, which matches the best here. You also get networking as standard, and there's a PictBridge-compatible USB port on the front for printing documents directly.

The benefits continue, with best-in-class print speeds. The 4040CN averaged 17ppm across all our tests. It was the fastest printer on test with mono jobs at 22ppm and it also held a handy lead as the quickest colour printer. Its single-pass colour engine means colour copies printed at the same rate as in monochrome, and 22ppm for 20 copies of the standard ISO test document is an excellent result.

We only experienced a significant drawback with our complex 24-page DTP document, which includes a mixture of text, graphics and photographs. 7ppm is a surprisingly poor result - it isn't significantly worse than any other printer here, but it's disappointing nevertheless for the most expensive printer on test.

At least we can't complain about quality. The Brother produced highly respectable results in our business graphics test. White text on a red background printed magnificently, and we were pleased with our monochrome photographic test as well, which produced smooth gradients. The only disappointment was our colour photo test - the Brother's test page was paler than that of any other printer, and badly lacked vibrancy.

The Brother is a cheap printer in terms of both standard and high yield cartridges, so if you and your small band of co-workers will be frequently producing colour prints it's a decent choice, and it will also suit low-volume printing at home. 

Canon i-SENSYS LBP5050

RRP: $449 Distributor: Topstar Computer

The LBP5050 has an ingenious design - pop open the front and the toner cartridges slide out on a spring-loaded drawer. It's this clever kind of design touch that allows the Canon to be one of the smallest and cheapest
in the group.

That compact design is partly due to the fact that the LBP5050 has all-in-one toner cartridges, whereas every other printer here has an image drum that will eventually need replacing. Disappointingly, this doesn't reduce the cost per page - it's in the middle of the pack for both mono and colour.

Surprisingly, though, it's an excellent performer. Canon claims print speeds of 12ppm and 8ppm for black and white and colour prints respectively, but we were surprised when the LBP5050 beat both of those claims by a page per minute. The drawback was the time to the first page, the longest of any printer: 26 seconds for a black and white page and more than half a minute for colour.

The quality of our tests was generally fine. For business graphs the LBP5050 is excellent, although it stumbled on our A4 colour photo. Colours were otherwise bold and accurate, and they emerged at a rate not far off those of black and white prints.

The LBP5050's size, price and competitive colour printing speeds all make it tempting. However, for anyone considering a printer for an office, the Dell 1320cn is the more obvious choice. And the Samsung CLP-315 offers such a small number of compromises that it's clearly a better buy for the home than this Canon. Sure, the Canon edges it for quality, but it can't keep up in colour printing, and its TCO consistently places it in the middle of the pack. The LBP5050 is a good printer, but it isn't a winner this month.