ARE YOU WONDERING who would want a black-only printer when there are color MFDs available for less than half the cost? These machines are intended to be 'personal' printers, meaning for professionals who work out of their homes or run a small office; and as 'small work group'

printers where a team of around 10 members can share such printer for their document printing needs. Seven of these printers are priced below the mark (the 5amsung ML¬2571N has an respectively). If your printing need is documents without color, getting a budget laser printer will give you a higher duty cycle (read: more rugged) and lower printing cost as compared to any entry level inkjet. Given the fact that these printers don't cost much, they can serve as secondary printers to complement a color inkjets or MFDs.

We tested each of these printers for quality and speed of printing, tabulated feature sets and weighed it against purchase price as well as cost per print. As we have mentioned in our previous issues, cost of acquisition is only part of the total cost of own¬ership. Running cost makes up the bulk of the total money spent during the lifetime of a printer. No wonder then, cost per print can make or break a deal for an enterprise or 5MB when it comes to adding printers to its IT infrastructure.

Especially since the text printing quality is similar across various models as we have seen with this set of seven lasers on test. Two printers each from HP, Canon, Brother and one each from Xerox and Sam¬sung made it to our labs for this shootout.