One of the most overused words in the computer industry is "compatible." Some manufacturers claim their products are "compatible with" just about anything-provided you spring for several hundred dollars' worth of add-ons or accessories.
The HP LaserJet 5M is about as compatible as an affordable workhorse workgroup printer gets. Right off the assembly line, it's already equipped with support for all major network operating systems, along with Plug-and-Play support for Ethernet 10BaseT (via a JetDirect card), BNC and LocalTalk hardware. Its chassis is crammed with 6MB of RAM (expandable to 52MB), support for PostScript Level 2 and an Intel RISC processor running at 33MHz to help make your print jobs painless.
The printer has 35 Type 1 fonts in residence; another 75 are included in the diskettes in the box, in addition to the 110 TrueType fonts that come standard with all HP LaserJet 5 models.
We tested the LaserJet 5M's 12-page-per-minute, 600x600-dot-per-inch engine on an enhanced capabilities port-equipped machine. We printed graphics-heavy documents, photograph printouts, and mixtures of various graphics and text. The 12ppm speed held fast, except when the unit tackled the most demanding documents-and even those took, at most, 10 seconds a page. Once the hard copy was in hand, another pleasant surprise was in store-the output was gorgeous, sharp and very clean.
Universal compatibility, up to 256 levels of gray scale, PCL 6 support and a duty cycle of 35,000 pages per month combine to make the LaserJet 5M a hard worker whose efficiency can't be beat.
HP LaserJet 5M
Price: $1,799
Pros: Setup; print quality; compatibility
Cons: Size; weight
Platforms: Windows 3.x, 95, NT, NetWare
Hewlett-Packard Co.
800-752-0900
WinMag Box Score 4.5
If you're trying to decide between an ink jet and a laser printer, consider Brother's HL-720 ink jet with true 600x600dpi resolution. The price range for good printers in both groups is now so close that features become the deciding factor. If you're willing to forsake color printing, you're probably looking for the traditional laser advantages of speed, professional-looking print and the ability to produce excellent, dependable results with a wide variety of paper. In all these respects, the HL-720 laser printer met our expectations. After a wait time of approximately 30 seconds, it delivered the promised six pages in just under a minute. The print quality was crisp and clean, and it handled 20-weight paper, card stock, sheet labels and envelopes effortlessly.
Despite its diminutive size, the HL-720 has a sturdy look and feel to it. You can load A4, letter, legal, B5 and A5 paper sizes, with weights from 16 to 42 pounds. The paper tray holds up to 100 sheets, and you can also print transparencies, postcards and labels.
The HL-720 performed so admirably that we never yearned for our larger, far more expensive office laser printer.
Brother HL-720
Price: $349.99
Pros: Crisp images; straight paper path
Cons: Somewhat noisy while printing
Platforms: Windows 3.x, 95
Brother International Corp.
800-276-7746, 908-356-8880
WinMag Box Score 4.0
Good-looking, high-quality color is what you'll get from Canon's BJC-610 ink jet printer. The BJC-610 produces up to 1.3 pages of output per minute, according to Canon. The average documents we printed-with occasional color text, logos or charts-averaged about a minute with low-quality, 360x360-dot-per-inch resolution.
The print head employs 256 nozzles, 64 each for cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Because the printer uses separate ink cartridges for each of these colors, you don't have to waste your money replacing a single four-color cartridge when only one of the four colors is depleted. Output quality is very good, though not as crisp as that of Hewlett-Packard's color DeskJet 660C. In particular, solid blacks were not as fully saturated.
The BJC-610 can handle plain or coated paper, card stock, high-gloss film and transparencies, and letter, legal, A4 and B5 paper sizes. You can load the sheet feeder with up to 100 pages, 50 transparencies or 15 envelopes, and adjust a lever to switch between envelopes and everything else. Many hobbyists can use the BJC-610 to print patterns on fabrics for their latest craft projects.
It ships with the Canon Creative CD, which includes a variety of applications that can create stationery, greeting cards (Micrografx's Hallmark Connections Everyday Greetings program), stickers and labels, or patterns (for those fabric fanatics). The CD includes more than 300 TrueType fonts, 300 clip-art pieces and Micrografx's Crayola Art, an excellent kids' drawing program.
Canon BJC-610
Price: $429
Pros: Good print quality; individual color cartridges
Cons: Cryptic panel lights
Platforms: Windows 3.x, 95, NT
Canon Computer Systems
800-848-4123, 714-438-3000
WinMag Box Score 4.5
The Okidata OL1200/PS offers options galore. Its versatile design supports individual and network printing for multiple platforms, including PC, Macintosh and UNIX. The OL1200/PS can be simultaneously connected with optional Ethernet or Token Ring network adapters, a parallel connection and a serial connection. Its automatic interface and automatic emulation switching allow single-printer support for a variety of computers.
The standard paper drawer accommodates several paper sizes, including letter, legal, executive, A4, A5, A6 and B5, and paper weights ranging from 16 to 24 pounds through the tray (16 to 32 pounds manual feed). The drawer pulls open from the front and its gauge approximates how much paper remains in the tray. In addition to the normal 500-sheet capacity, you can configure the printer to use the front feeder, increasing capacity to 600 pages. You can also increase paper capacity with an optional multipurpose feeder that holds up to 50 envelopes (the standard feeder handles 10) and 100 sheets of paper. You can even add a second 500-sheet drawer.
In our test, the OL1200/PS, with its 600x600dpi default resolution enhanced by OKI Smoothing Technology, printed 11 pages per minute, close to the rated 12ppm. It takes the printer less than 15 seconds to warm up from standby mode. In typical operation mode, it consumes about 100 watts of power, with a maximum of 600 watts. When not printing, its Energy Star-compliant mechanism goes into power-saving mode. The overall performance and print quality of the OL1200/PS were outstanding.
Okidata OL1200/PS
Price: $1,839
Pros: Output; options; installation
Cons: None significant
Platforms: Windows 3.x, 95, NT
Okidata
800-OKI-DATA, 609-235-2600
WinMag Box Score 4.0
While you can't exactly slip it into your pocket, NEC's compact, under-20-pound SuperScript 860 is still the first high-quality laser printer you can lift without conscious effort. Combine that with its great output, hot speeds and nifty interface, and you get a $500 winner that beats the pants off most other personal lasers and ink jets.
One of the first to use Adobe's PrintGear architecture and Memory Booster technology, the 860 maxes out at 5MB RAM. The unit we tested came with only 1MB. Normally, that's not enough to print the smile on a happy face, but Memory Booster effectively triples the printer's memory via compression techniques-our printer's 1MB became 3MB. If you send a file that needs more memory, the 860 automatically drops from its normal 600dpi to a still-acceptable 300dpi.
At 5 percent coverage, 860 toner cartridges are rated at 5,000 pages instead of the 2,500 to 3,000 usually seen in this category.
Price, great performance and excellent output make it the personal printer of choice for Pentium users, especially those with Windows 95 and 16MB of RAM.
NEC SuperScript 860
Price: $499.95
Pros: Print speed; output quality; interface
Cons: CPU/memory-dependent performance
Platforms: Windows 3.x, 95, NT
RAM: 4MB (Win 3.x), 8MB (Win95)
NEC Technologies
800-388-8888; 415-528-6000
WinMag Box Score 4.5
Though $5,000 may seem like a lot to pay for a laser printer, the HP LaserJet 5Si MX packs in paper-handling, output and networking features that make it worth the price.
This network powerhouse is built to handle the demands of a large workgroup with ease and style. It is decked out with two 500-sheet input paper trays and a 100-sheet multipurpose tray that can handle 10 different sizes of printable media, to make restocking paper a once-in-a-while job. You can also add a whopping 2,000-sheet input tray (for $1,299) to bring the total capacity to 3,100 sheets.
This speed demon whips out letter- and A4-sized documents at 24 pages per minute with a resolution of 600x600 dots per inch. The unit weighs in at 99 pounds and measures 21.3 by 31.3 by 20.5 inches. It comes standard with 12MB of RAM, expandable to 76MB. The LaserJet 5Si is rated for a duty cycle of 100,000 pages per month.
The printer's networking options are legion: They include 10Base2 and 10BaseT Ethernet and DIN-8 LocalTalk bidirectional interfaces, as well as an HP MIO expansion slot. The unit supports just about any network OS right out of the box. The included JetAdmin software gives network managers real-time remote printer status and diagnostic alerts.
HP LaserJet 5Si MX
Price: $4,899
Pros: Paper handling; speed
Cons: Price
Platforms: Windows 3.x, 95, NT, Netware
Hewlett-Packard Co.
800-752-0900
WinMag Box Score 4.5
The OL810e/PS is an excellent choice for any office. It offers clean, crisp output and a multitude of features.
The printer measures 7.9 by 12.8 by 14.6 inches and weighs 23 pounds. Its paper drawer holds 250 sheets in various formats with a choice of front- or rear-tray paper exit. Top tray collection will handle 150 sheets in correct order, and the rear tray will handle 50 sheets of straight-through output. You can also add another paper drawer and multipurpose feeder. Choose print resolutions of 300x300, 600x600 or 600x1200dpi. Resident fonts include 35 Adobe Type 1, 35 PCL, 10 TrueType scalable typefaces and USPS PostNet Bar Codes. There is also provision for optional font cards.
The control panel provides button-access to the printer's functions and, in addition to the control panel window, a single light indicates the printer's status. The OL810e/PS comes with 3MB of standard RAM (6MB effective RAM with Adobe Memory Booster Technology), which can be upgraded to 19MB. The toner cartridge's estimated life is approximately 2,000 pages. Our tests showed a print speed of 5 pages per minute-less than the rated 8ppm. Printed output quality was outstanding.
Okidata OL810e/PS
Price: $1,439
Pros: Output; design
Cons: None significant
Platforms: Windows 3.x, 95, NT
Okidata
800-OKI-DATA, 609-235-2600
WinMag Box Score 4.0
This sassy desktop assistant produces such outstanding monochrome and color output that it's sure to please even the most demanding user at a price that's hard to beat. With a maximum resolution of 720x720 dots per inch, the Epson Stylus Color 500 capably executes most color printing tasks, including acceptable reproduction of color photographs. With its support for printing modes of 180x180dpi and 360x360dpi, you can likewise be assured of consistent output for less demanding jobs.
As with competing printers, the Epson's paper loads at the back of the unit and exits at the front. The easily adjusted paper guides are a welcome feature because the unit handles both paper and envelopes from the same feeder. To accommodate envelopes, you move a lever on the right side of the feeder to compensate for the difference in thickness.
The printer uses one cartridge for black ink and a triple-reservoir cartridge for color reproduction. Both cartridges differ from those of the Epson Stylus Color printer.
The speed of printed output varies, depending on the resolution setting and mode of operation. A 580-word, single-page, black-and-white document required one minute to print at 360x360dpi. At 720x720dpi, the same document took three minutes. A single-page graphics file with three charts, each using four colors, required four minutes at 360x360dpi and 5.5 minutes at 720x720dpi. However, a lengthy 10 minutes was needed to print a color picture at 720x720dpi. Still, this is a good purchase at an affordable price.
Epson Stylus Color 500
Price: $279
Pros: Price; versatility; color
Cons: High cost of disposables
Platforms: Windows 3.x, 95
Epson America
800-GO-EPSON, 310-782-0770
WinMag Box Score 4.0
Canon's approach to a multifunction device begins with a high-quality color BubbleJet printer with a 720x360-dot-per-inch resolution. It's reasonably fast, too, at 5 pages per minute for black-and-white printing. Color printing ranges from 0.3ppm to 0.8ppm. The attractive unit looks like a plain-paper fax machine, measures 14 by 15.6 by 19 inches and weighs 16.7 pounds.
The Canon unit arrives with both a black ink cartridge (preferable when using the device as a fax machine) and a four-color cartridge that includes black. Don't use the four-color cartridge for faxing because you'll run out of black much more quickly than if you use the single black cartridge.
Canon's setup is quite easy, literally a 15-minute operation. The well-written manual guides you through the process, and it's particularly easy to set up the station identity for outgoing faxes. Incoming faxes can be set to print upon receipt or be stored in memory-the C2500 can hold 42 pages in memory at a time.
The color output is good. When used as a monochrome printer, the Canon's blacks appear a dark charcoal gray, but the resolution is excellent and at least the hue is closer to black than the blue-black of early ink jet printers. The MultiPASS offers a colorful bubble jet printer, great software and a knock-'em-dead price.
Canon MultiPASS C2500
Price: $599
Pros: Setup; software; color capability
Cons: Not a laser
Platforms: Windows 3.x, 95, NT
Canon Computer Systems
800-848-4123, 714-438-3000
WinMag Box Score 4.5
Toshiiba set out to build a multifunction office machine, and started with a high-quality commercial fax machine-the TF-601. Adding the excellent ImageVision III software transforms the fax machine into a serious multifunction device. ImageVision gives you the feedback and control normally found in laser printers using the Windows Printing System, plus control of fax and scanning functions.
Setup is a bit complicated; you must load the toner, which can spill if you're not careful. Setting the station identity is more complicated than it ought to be and is hindered by a difficult-to-follow manual. Once operational, though, the Toshiba unit shines.
The entire Toshiba system-even with built-in laser printer-is quite small, measuring 9.1 by 15.4 by 16.2 inches. It weighs in at 19.8 pounds. Print speed is 4 pages per minute. Laser output is acceptable, although no one would mistake its 300-dot-per-inch printed pages, even with Print Smoothing, for the output of a 600dpi standalone printer.
The TF-601 shows its origin as a fax machine-the unit is also sold as a standalone fax model without the ImageVision software-by having a telephone handset on the left side. It includes a full-function fax modem, albeit only 9600Kbps. Standard memory holds 20 pages in fax memory. The letter tray can contain 160 pages, and the autodialer can hold 70 locations-16 accessible through one-button dialing keys. You can broadcast faxes to up to 20 locations.
Toshiba TF-601
Price: $1,799
Pros: Built-in laser printer
Cons: No color capability; difficult setup
Platforms: Windows 3.x, 95
Toshiba America Information Systems
800-GO-TOSHIBA, 714-583-3000
WinMag Box Score 4.0