Your nifty-looking handout was a labor of love. You spent days tweaking the design and reworking the ad copy. Now it's time to put your on-screen masterpiece to paper. In most cases, the 'lil Mona Lisa will debut via ink-jet or laser printer, maybe even through a professional printer. Which is best for you?

Ink-jet printers work by squirting ink onto the page. They print at resolutions from 150 to 1,400 dots per square inch (dpi) and generally cost from $99 to $400. Laser printers, which bond toner onto a page with heat, just as photocopy machines do, offer resolutions from 600 to 1,200 dpi and cost $300 and up. Keep in mind that when manufacturers specify a printer's speed (table), the number reflects the output at the printer's lowest quality. If you want it to look good, you have to slow down.

First, ink jets. Color ink-jet printers excel at producing multihued fliers and realistic color photographs, while the black-and-white mode makes even sharper images at higher speeds. The more expensive the model, generally the better the resolution and print speed. (Speeds for black-and-white ink jets range from 3 to 10 pages per minute (ppm) and 1/2 to 3 ppm in color.) The cost of production? For black-and-white ink jets, expect to shell out from 3 to 5 cents per page. Color pages run from 15 to 20 cents each.

COSTLY COLOR. Laser printers are, of course, more popular with businesses and can print at faster speeds -- 8 to 40 ppm and produce even cleaner black text than ink jets. What's more, they do it on the cheap: Black-and-white printouts cost no more than 2 cents per page. The bargains stop, however, once you start shopping for color laser printers. Among the least expensive color lasers is the Tektronix Phaser 740, which, at $2,000, is about half the price of most others on the market. The model we tested seemed to produce splotchy patches of light colors.

When shopping for a printer, make resolution your first criterion. Usually, 600 dpi is a good start, but the more dots per square inch, the better the text and image quality. If you're considering an ink-jet printer, there are other factors, too, such as the way the printer lays the ink and the size and thickness of the ink drops. For these reasons, examine sample output -- in both text and images -- from any printer you're eyeing. Paper quality can also affect print quality, so don't buy the cheapest stuff on the rack.

To compare ongoing costs, check the price of replacement ink-jet and laser cartridges as well as the vendor's estimate of how many pages each cartridge can print. You'll soon discover that operating costs often exceed the price of the printer within a year.

Even if you can print attractive documents from your printer, there are reasons to consider a professional printer or service bureau. They're equipped to handle high-volume jobs, and may do it at a much lower per-page cost. They'll also come in handy if you want to use a size or weight of paper incompatible with your printer or want to use fancy folding for a brochure or advertising piece.

In working with a professional print house, your office printer may still play a role by producing a master document. This way, you can provide the shop with a black-and-white or color original that is reproduced via copy machine, or you can ship off black-and-white artwork that the print shop colorizes in-house. Regardless of the way you reproduce documents, the duplicates will only be as good as the quality of your office printer.

When working with color, many small businesses choose to go with a pro. Luckily, desktop publishing software has made that easier -- and cheaper -- by allowing you to save files into color separations (print shops usually charge a fee for making separations). But before you take files to the local pro, be sure to discuss whether the colors that appear on the printed page will look like those on your computer. Don't forget to make sure your fonts are compatible, too. So-called TrueType fonts are most likely to reproduce correctly. In other words, be prepared for some minor glitches. That's the price you'll have to pay for saving a few bucks.

By Wayne Kawamoto in La Verne, Calif.

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TABLE: Inkjets and Laser Printers
To: TECHNOLOGY