Additional Information Side Bars Everyone Into The Virtual Pool By Jay Milne Many years ago, all you needed to do to add pizzazz to a printed document was use a variety of fonts and graphics. Today, everyone wants color printouts. Trends like this may make some network managers cringe. In terms of initial expense and cost of ownership, color printer prices continue to drop. This is due in part to the growing demand for color printers and the broad use of applications that can generate color output.
Color printers use the same networking components as their monochrome cousins.
AppleTalk over Ethernet also comes standard on most color printers. And if you have Macintosh users on your token-ring network, you'll need all the proper support options. In addition to the network connection, your color printer should have a serial or parallel port because these give you greater connectivity options. For example, if a user needs a coax connection to attach to the mainframe and the printer's network adapter does not support coax, you can attach the printer to an external device with coax connectivity via the parallel or serial port. Additionally, the ability to connect a laptop to the color printer directly is very convenient in those instances when network connectivity for the laptop is not possible.