This was a nice tight little article.

Any chance we could get a similar buying guide for Laser printers strictly for the home user; if there is such a thing. Now that prices are coming down (especially this holiday season) Laser printers are looking more and more attractive. Especially when a single ink cart. can cost as much as $25 with some ink jets, a month or two, or worse only a few weeks.

Thanks again for the article.

I'll never buy another inkjet. I've had an old network Laserjet for years now that I picked up used for $60 and it's still plugging away reliably to this day. I've only had to buy toner for it once and the black-and-white print quality is superior to any inkjet I've had. We've got it hooked up to our wireless hub and so can easily print from every computer in the house. Laser printers are much cheaper to operate and they're also more reliable then inkjet printers, or at least my old laserjet sure has been. I would like a color laser printer, though. I would very much like to see a comparison review of inexpensive color laser printers. There are some amazingly inexpensive ones now, and I'd really like to know which, if any, are any good, and how long the toner lasts. I'm not that concerned about print speed. I can wait.

Why in the hell are you reviewing three laser printers priced from $500 to $650? Why not review laser printers in the $100-$300 range (including some color) and then comment about total cost of ownership based on the costs and frequency of toner replacement? If i were buying a laser printer for an "office" purpose, i wouldn't buy these things, i'd go HP all the way. Laserjets are the gold standard for office duty-cycle printing tasks, even if they are the most expensive.

I guess you guys have a thankless job. Can't keep everybody happy. Anyway, thanks for the great articles. I have a Lexmark C532n (<$450)that works just great and has great reviews. You can buy the duplexer for about $100 more. I've had it for a year in my business and it works great. Color output is superior and prints at about 25 ppm color and B/W. My Print cost is about .07 for B/W and .13 for color. Overall, it's been a great printer.

We've had a Phaser 6180DN for about two years now, and we've only had one reservation and one real problem.

Reservation: Colors in photos tend to be a bit dark/oversaturated.

Problem: We've had two defective black toner cartridges, which caused the entire print area of a page to look dingy.

In the case of the printing problem, Xerox bent over backwards in a way I can't imagine any other company would. By the time their techies has solved the problem, they had replaced both our fuser and our transfer unit for free, and had sent a technician down two or three times. And we did NOT have any service agreement other than the standard one-year warranty!

BTW, you can save a few dollars per cartridge (and save on shipping, too) by shopping around on-line.

We use the 6180N at home and at the office. Xerox makes high quality printers that produce great output. I haven't used my inkjet since buying the laser. Prices at costco.com dip into the low $300s, which is amazing considering they ship with toner cartridges (albeit not as high capacity as replacement cartridges).

Not a very good article -- you did a poor job of defining the criteria for the review/recommendations. The review was obviously aimed at home use, and you consider text quality and print speed important factors to consider. But there is no consideration of long term cost of ownership, reliability, or consistency of output over time. I learned the hard way these factors matter just a much as text quality, considering most lasers, color included, will printe at least "good" quality text.

I own a small business and regularly produce user manuals for our products. The manuals have a fair amount of color graphics and a few photos. I bought a color laser based on the image quality, but it turned out to be a real pain after only a few thousand pages. The dang thing could not consisently and relaibly produce good color. And, while text quality in black for most lasers is quite good, more importantly would be the ability to print text of mixed colors. When you print text with all four colors, registration better be damn accurate or the text will look blurry.

You also don't mention anything about different sized paper - after my first disaster with a color laser I was very skeptical the technology was advanced enough -- then I bought a Ricoh color laser that can handle double sided tabloid (11 x 17) pages. It cranks out 50 38-page manuals without a hitch, has consistent reliable color, is fast, duplexes faithfully, and has the ability to add a folder and stapler unit. Granted, I'm not talking about a $600 printer.

As for the comments about a color laser matching a color inkjet - yes for basic graphics and charts, but if you want to produce photo quality images inkjet is still the way to go. a color laser won't come close in that quality measure.