Affordable Personal Laser 

This is a desktop laser printer for personal use and small workgroups that prints up to 600x600 dpi resolution at a rated 13 ppm. It has both USB and parallel port interface, and the interesting thing is that both are active simultaneously. This allows you to install and use it on two machines simultaneously. 

We tested the printer on a machine with PIII 800 MHz, 128 MB RAM, 4 GB hard drive, running Win 98 SE. It can print at two resolutions of 600 and 300 dpi. There’s also a toner saving mode. The printer’s text printing capabilities are fine, with the minimum readable font size being 2 pt. It churned out text pages at 12 ppm, close to its rated speed of 13 ppm. On the graphics front, a full-page monochrome image came out well without any banding. Prints of thin lines and curves however came out so light that they were hardly visible. Changing the print mode to dark improved the situation slightly. 

The printer supports a variety of OSs, including Win 9x/ Me/2000/NT 4.0 and even RedHat Linux 6.x, 7.0 or later. It runs on a 66 MHz RISC processor, and has 4 MB memory. It has a 150 sheet input paper tray, and a 100 sheet output bin. You can also manually feed single sheets to print labels and letterheads. The printer supports a variety of print media. Its toner costs Rs 4,000, and is rated to give 2000 pages, which translates to Rs 2 per print in normal mode. In toner saving mode, toner usage can be reduced by up to 50%. 

The bottom line At a price tag of Rs 17,500, it’s a good option for small offices and workgroups. It can be used for printing good-quality letters and other documents, and even monochrome images. 

Sachin Makhija at PCQ Labs