Before you settle on a new printer, consider printing and dating several status sheets to obtain a rough idea of how much paper traffic your printer must handle. Adding paper trays may do the trick, or you may want to get a higher-capacity printer, like the Lexmark Optra T614N, which can hold over 2800 sheets with optional trays in place. Either way, just about all the printers we tested produce clean, precise text that looks great on almost any business document. Gray-scale print quality, on the other hand, varies noticeably among the printers we compared. If you plan to use your monochrome laser for page-layout proofs or photos, pay close attention to graphics print quality.
Flexibility separates today's printers from the old-timers.
Laser printer makers are differentiating their products with timesaving standard features and options. Laser printers that come with standard or optional hard drives can perform timesaving tricks as well. A few models come with drivers that let you store a password to complete printing a document when you're standing at the printer. The PC World Test Center benchmarked 13 new monochrome lasers, ranging from single-user printers to units that can serve large workgroups, and matched these against 16 previously tested models. Then we picked our 5 favorite lasers for the small-office environment and our top 5 corporate machines.