11/16/98 A RAINBOW OF PRINTER CHOICES

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A RAINBOW OF PRINTER CHOICES
The boundaries are blurring between inkjets and lasers

THE CANON BJC-50
Photoillustration by Roger Kenny

For years, the world of color printers was divided into two poles. To the south were low-end inkjets, which cost as little as $90 and appealed to home users. To the north were color lasers, priced at thousands of bucks each and embraced by the power-graphics crowd. Now, the boundaries are blurring. Such features as color invoices and splashy letterheads will soon be within everyone's reach.
Leading the way in value is Hewlett-Packard Co. (HWP), whose HP 2000C series of color inkjets rivals the lasers in quality and operating cost--and at a fraction of the price. This network-ready printer is the first from HP to use separate printheads and ink tanks--which means that the four ink cartridges (magenta, cyan, yellow, and black) may be replaced without discarding $30 printheads that last four to five years. The result: printing costs of 5 cents per color page and 2 cents for black-and-white--about half what you'd pay using HP's other inkjets.
If you want the finer resolution and higher capacity of a laser printer, check out Tektronix Inc.'s (TEK) Phaser 740 color printer. At $1,995, it costs about $500 less than comparable models--and the 740L monochrome version can be converted to color for $500 in service fees and extra cartridges.
INFRARED SIGNALS. For speed at low operating costs, Xerox Corp.'s (XRX) monochrome DocuPrint N40 is a sound bet. It can churn out 40 pages per minute at a penny each. And the machine sells for just $3,000--about one-fifth the price of high-volume printers a year ago.
And for those executives who want to print on the run, or late at night in their hotel rooms, Canon's new BJC-50 portable is the best buy. The $349 color inkjet, powered by a lithium-ion battery, is the size of a cigarette carton, weighs just 2.1 pounds, and can print out 100 pages without recharging. Its infrared data port can receive signals from infrared-equipped Laptops and organizers, and it makes printer cables unnecessary. Best of all, you can replace the printhead and ink cartridge with an optional $99 scanner. That will help you create a lot more documents--and let you print them out, in color, at the office, too.
By Steven V. Brull in Los Angeles

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