New Color Printers

Date: Mar 11, 2005
Contributor: Julianne Grumbles

New workgroup printers mean color for all budgets


Government offices can now be a bit more colorful. The walls might remain off-white—or even battleship gray—but the documents circulating inside them need no longer be confined to black and white.

Until recently, color laser-quality printing has been an expensive option, even for midsize workgroups. With mid-level printers costing $5,000 or more, even on the GSA schedule, color was a difficult budget item to justify.

Today, however, printer companies have made great strides in narrowing the price gap between black-and-white and color printing. Network color printers for midsize workgroups can be found for less than $1,000, and even the most expensive models come in at less than $4,000. And with 10,000 or more page runs before the toner needs to be replaced, the supplies are affordable too.

Considering the advantages of color printing, even spot color, there is no reason not to adopt a color printer over a black-and-white model for the next upgrade cycle. Color graphics and charts are much easier to read when actually printed in color, and the ability to print a photo and have it look like the original image is priceless.

For this review, GCN Lab asked leading printer companies to supply a printer for a typical government office workgroup, in which 20 to 30 people share a single printer. Printers were graded on their speed of black-and-white printing, speed of color printing, output quality, ease of setup and price. Six companies rose to the challenge. Kyocera Mita Corp. was also asked to participate but was unable to get a printer to the lab by deadline.

In the end we found that the best color workgroup printer may still be the most expensive one, but midsize offices can find exceptional values.

How we tested

We began by evaluating how easy it was to set up each printer. We used the bundled network setup software to configure the products in our lab. Then we went through various functions, such as paper handling and supplies menus. We were looking for intuitive interfaces and rich feature sets.

We conducted performance testing using two documents. The first was a 30-page black-and-white text document. The second document was a 30-page mix of text and color graphics. Some pages had text wrapping around graphics; others were all graphics.

To ensure a fair evaluation, we connected each printer to a test system via a USB 2.0 port. This enabled us to test raw speed regardless of network status. We also measured the time it took each product to print the first page of the text and graphics, as well as how long it took each product to warm up after they were powered on.

We evaluated output quality by comparing printouts to one another and examining them in light of the known image properties of each graphic. We examined text for readability or printing errors.

What we found

Having spent several weeks with these printers, we were pleased to find there’s something for everyone in the workgroup printer market. Our favorite printers were the pricey $3,899 Xerox Phaser 7300/N and the moderately priced $1,635 Lexmark C760n (which actually has an even lower base price—$1,299). Both performed exceptionally well and were easy to set up. Ultimately we liked the Phaser 7300/N’s output quality better than the C760n’s.

But perhaps the most pleasant surprise was the $650 Brother HL-2700CN. It’s a workgroup printer that doesn’t come with the horsepower of the Phaser 7300/N or Lexmark C760n but produces good printouts. We found its text quality to be the best in this review. If yours is an agency on a budget (and whose isn’t?) and you print more text than graphics, the Brother printer is a good fit.




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