Bake-Off: Eight Color Printers Put Through The Paces

Of all the major segments in IT, the printer space remains one of the most expansive and competitive. While consolidation in the software and PC spaces has continued apace over the past year, the printer industry is as broad as ever—and choices remain as complex when it comes to color printing.

What's most important: speeds and feeds or quality? Pricing or management capability? Color quality or ease of deployment?

For this comparative review, the CRN Test Center looked at color laser printers from eight different manufacturers. As reviewers looked at one printer after another, it became clear that many vendors focus on one or two strengths over all others.

Methodology
Different factors are key in different enterprises when deploying a color laser printing solution. A marketing department may be interested primarily in color quality. A law office may be interested in occasional color, but mostly in print speed since output volume may be huge. A small real estate branch office may want a combination of decent color and speed, but may also be concerned with noise level. Larger IT shops may put a premium on management. CFOs are, of course, concerned with both cost of acquisition and of operation.

In this comparative review, reviewers tried to incorporate enough of these items into a single methodology so that a VAR could make a strong case in any one of them. We examined energy efficiency, including how many watts were consumed during print jobs and idling. We looked at pages-per-minute and how long it would take to print a longer, 185-page job. We looked at management consoles of each, noise output and, of course, color quality, where we ran the same five color pages out of each printer and gave each set from each printer to three reviewers to determine an average result.

There were some common strengths from one printer to another. Web-based management consoles all tended to perform baseline tasks such as monitoring toner levels and printed pages. All were network-intelligent and played nice in an enterprise setting. All were essentially energy-efficient, kept noise to office-acceptable levels and could be deployed and up and running in 10 to 15 minutes.

In other cases, there were notable differences. When we invited each vendor to participate in this review, we gave them our methodology and left it up to them to decide which configuration in their product lineup to send. A vendor could send us its fastest, most powerful color laser printer—but if that unit was the most expensive, price would be a factor as well. A vendor could send us a printer that produced the most vibrant, beautiful color documents, but that might be so slow that other printers would do better in a side-by-side comparison.

In the end, the Test Center combined the results of the tests on each printer to determine, from a VAR's point of view, which would be the easiest to install, deliver value, maintain and from which to profit. The winner wasn't the fastest, the cheapest or the one that produced the best color. But it was so good at all those tasks—and from a company with a solid channel program—that it was our top pick.

Next: First Place: Oki Data C6150