CRNTech: Seven best colour laser printers

Lexmark C540n

RRP: $739 Distributor: Altech

The C540n is the best printer for small workgroups this month. Not only is the cost of the unit bearable, but it's also network capable, quick, and offers excellent quality.

Workgroup features run throughout the printer. The paper tray, for instance, has the joint highest capacity on 
test at 250 pages, and the single-pass engine means sheets need to run through its cavernous interior only once, no matter whether they're printed in full colour or black and white.

The Lexmark hovered at a steady 20ppm in all our tests. The only time we saw a significantly slower speed was with our 24-page DTP document, whose complexities resulted in a 5ppm drop in speed. Still, at 15ppm for this demanding document, the Lexmark remains the fastest printer on test.

It also produced the most elegant text in our tests, and was superb when printing business documents. Colours appeared as they should and text on a coloured background - always tricky for cheap laser printers - looked great.

With all that power, it doesn't come as a shock that the Lexmark is a little more expensive to run than some of the other printers this month - but not by much. After just a few thousand pages it's been overtaken by the rising costs of most rivals, and it remains lower than most as the page count soars. These costs will be higher, incidentally, if you intend to print on the C540n from an Apple computer - Lexmark's driver currently doesn't support monochrome-only printing.

But that problem aside, the Lexmark is incredibly fast and produces great quality prints. It's also network-ready, well built and reasonably thrifty. The huge 250-page paper tray means you can set it up and leave it, and the initial pain of buying it is less than with more expensive printers. The Lexmark is beaten in the all-round stakes only by our labs winner, the cheap to run Brother.

Oki C130n

RRP: $395 Distributor: Xit Distribution

At less than 30cm wide, the Oki is one of the smallest printers on test. It's also one of the least expensive.

Even at that value price, you get some useful workgroup features, such as a network port and the second-largest paper tray on test, but the C130n's performance suggests that busy offices should look elsewhere. It's four pass, for a start, which means the Oki's colour performance is pretty slow at 5ppm.

Reserve it for black and white printing, though, and you're looking at the third-fastest printer here - we saw 21ppm on our straightforward black and white documents, and a good time to first page of 11 seconds. Print quality was consistently good, too.

It scored perfectly on our business graphics test, thanks to flawless black text and decent quality when it came to printing on coloured backgrounds. It was also close to the top printers in the group for photographic output. The only complaint we had was when the C130n was tasked with printing fine gradients, since there was a small amount of stepping in evidence.

This makes the Oki seem incredibly appealing, and viewed on its own it would be. It's quiet and produced decent quality prints. However, there's the significant question of the competition posed by other printers this month, and that's where it comes unstuck. For instance, its slow colour speed means it will never be a practical choice for any but the smallest workgroup, which is why the Brother has the edge - that's before we even consider the cost of ownership of this printer.

Alternatively, it's hard to ignore the Dell 1320cn, which is faster than the Oki despite costing around $50 less. The Oki is an undeniably good piece of hardware, with stacks of features and good results in our tests, but this month the competition simply outdoes it where it counts.