Content area
Full Text
Folks in the know say that marketing is war, and the color printer market has indeed come to resemble a war zone. Two new low-cost models battle for our corporate Best Buy, with Tektronix's $1850 Phaser 740/N prevailing. The other, an even cheaper model from QMS, misses the chart. At $1300, the Magicolor 2 DeskLaser is astoundingly affordable for a color laser, but design compromises make it a weak choice for some offices.
Two other newcomers also fall short: Canon's CLBP 460 PS and Hewlett-Packard's Color LaserJet 4500 offer decent performance and features, but their prices--$3000 and $2500, respectively--hail from an earlier era.
On the home front, the Canon BJC-5000 remains our Best Buy, while Epson's new $149 Stylus Color 440 squeaks onto the chart. HP's $149 DeskJet 697 doesn't make the cut.
Color Conundrums
There are many reasons to choose a color laser over a networkable and comparatively fast ink jet, but until recently, price wasn't one of them. Now QMS attacks this last barrier: At $1300, its Magicolor 2 DeskLaser costs little more than a high-speed, networked ink jet such as Hewlett Packard's $1199 2000CN. But the DeskLaser doesn't include some typical laser advantages. It lacks the PostScript page description language (handy for offices working on multiple platforms); you can't increase its 8MB memory unless you first replace the main circuit board (for $1300 extra) and buy extra RAM; and it prints text at a poky 3.3 pages per minute, much slower than most of its color laser competitors. (Its 1.1-ppm graphics speed is strong.) The DeskLaser prints crisp text, and clean--if pale-- graphics. But its good print quality is not enough to overcome its design weaknesses.
Tektronix's Phaser 740/N suffers none of the DeskLaser's limitations. PostScript comes standard. Its speed--8.9 ppm on text and 0.5 ppm on graphics--is on a par with that of other color lasers. It supports an optional $695 paper-handling subsystem that includes a duplexer and two extra 250-sheet paper trays, and increasing its 32MB of memory enables support for additional capabilities such as 1200- dpi printing. Our one criticism of the 740/N is its uneven print quality. The printer performs well on text but produces heavy, dark color graphics.
Canon's CLBP 460 PS and HP's Color LaserJet...