As we've said in every installment of this multi-part printer buyer's guide, we continue to be amazed by the features, functions, and capabilities that relatively modest amounts of money will buy in a printer. This collection of a dozen color lasers, including two MFC units and ten straight-up printers, is certainly no exception. All of these units offer a 10/100 network interface via RJ45 as a standard feature, along with USB 2.0 for direct attachment to a single PC. Four of the units bow toward the past and include parallel interfaces as well, while Dell, HP, and Lexmark all offer wireless network interfaces as options, some with print servers. Lexmark even offers Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) interfaces for its printers as well.

Of all the units we worked with for this review, we came away most impressed when we didn't factor photo printing into our considerations. Though a couple of these printers did decent jobs at printing photographs (on plain and glossy paper), most of them don't really compare well with the kind of photo output you can get on a cheaper inkjet printer.

That observation aside, we found that text output, speed, and cost per page for output is far better on a color laser than on an inkjet. In this area, we were particularly impressed with four units: the Dell 3110cn offers a great combination of speed, features, and cost, as does the Lexmark C534n. We'd rate these as great for SOHO situations where print volume and quality are both important. On the other hand, we liked the HP Color LaserJet 2600n and the Samsung CLP-600n for their graphics and text handling capabilities, even though they are decidedly on the slow side for laser based devices Compare Prices on Color Laser Printers.

The two MFC printers - the HP Color LaserJet 2840 and the Samsung CLX-3160FN - also suffer from slow color output, but may warrant a second look for personal and SOHO users with light-duty printing needs, who also want the convenience of an all-in-one printer to handle copying and scanning as well as printing.