Laser Tag Affordability has finally caught up with performance in laser printers. Does that make you "it"?

Twenty minutes. That's how long it took to get going--fromopening the box until we were printing a test sheet from theSamsung ML-1651N networkable laser printer. Not too shabby. You canexpect to get a good degree of user-friendliness when dealing withmost of the lasers on the market, even when you take the extra stepof tying them into your network. Congratulations, you're onewire away from sharing a printer.

The days of working in an office that looks like an inkjet ranchor spending a Bill Gatesian ransom on a laser printer are gone.Growing businesses can now choose from a herd of affordablemonochrome lasers to meet their workgroup printing needs. Benefitsof going this route include low consumables costs, fast printoutsand robust duty cycles. One disadvantage is lack of color, butthat's still not a requirement for most business printing. Forthe sake of comparison, the one exception in this (rticle is theXerox Phaser 8200. We'll give you more on that later. No matterwhat, a good laser will look like Charles Atlas compared to youraverage inkjet.

As with your choice of computer, you'll want to choose aprinter that meets you at the intersection of budget andperformance. For example, the $1,580 (all prices street) HPLaserJet 4100N has a maximum duty cycle of 150,000 pages per monthand a top speed of 25 pages per minute (ppm). Need more speed? Youcan get the same duty cycle and 35 ppm out of the MINOLTA-QMSPagePro 9100 N for the slightly more attractive price of $1,499.Remember, duty cycles and ppm numbers are like gas mileage-actualperformance and output quality can depend on how hard you driveyour machine. Other specs to look out for are processor speed andmemory. Just as with that PC sitting under your desk, a higherprocessor speed and more memory help boost performance. The amountof RAM, in particular, is an issue when the printer has to keeptrack of multiple print jobs coming in. The MINOLTA-QMS PagePro9100 N comes standard with 64MB of memory and can be upgraded to512MB if you need more.