Four Lasers Take on Color Printing

By Lowell Rapaport

Color is now a part of everyday business communications. We test four color laser printers that add power and persuasion to reports, presentations and even day-to-day communications.

Itıs easy to make a case for color, but what about the cost? Imaging & Document Solutions has explored this question as it pertains to scanning, but the same opportunity is emerging when it comes to output. Advances in technology have made color printing more affordable. Itıs time to reassess your needs before you buy that next departmental printer.

Nobody needs convincing that graphics, photos and even text pages work better with color. Now think about the Web site work youıve taken on or the color forms you have to create and proof before you print them in high volumes. Color is no longer confined to the annual report, itıs part of everyday communications.

When it comes to color, inkjet is a popular choice for home or small-office applications, but if you need years of high-volume service, youıll want to choose laser. Color laser printers have a higher initial purchase price and higher incremental consumables costs, but the overall cost per page is lower for laser printers than it is for inkjets.

For this article we tested four popular color laser printers: the Hewlett-Packard Color Laserjet 4500, the Xerox C55mp, the Panasonic KX-P8420 and the NEC 4400. All four will complement any color-capable organization. Each has distinctive strengths in color and monochrome quality, but our Editorıs Choice, the Panasonic KX-P8420, gave the best combination of color and monochrome output performance.

HP Color Laserjet 4500

The 4500 has a new printer engine. Previous Hewlett-Packard color laser printers used a bulky printer engine with separate refillable bottles for toner and many replaceable consumable parts. The new engine is simpler. It uses sealed toner cartridges and there are no separate pads or bottles of fuser oil to replace or refill.

The Color Laserjet 4500 I tested was shipped with an HP Jetdirect network card. Standard features include two built-in paper trays and 64 MB of memory. The printer is rated at 16 pages per minute in monochrome and four pages per minute in color. In my tests, I was able to achieve 15 pages per minute in monochrome and about four pages per minute printing color business graphics incorporating charts and graphs created with Microsoft Excel.

HPıs four-button control panel was the simplest of the printers we tested. The buttons are Menu/Exit, Cancel, Continue and Enter. Pressing the Menu button takes the printer off-line and displays the menus on a two line LCD display.

The front of the 4500 is dominated by a large drawer containing the printer transfer belt. A plastic tray for envelopes or up to 100 sheets of paper is built into this drawer. There is a separate 250-sheet printer tray below for letter and legal-size paper. The printer we tested had an optional duplex unit and 500-sheet paper tray. Setting up the printer with these accessories is easy but requires more heavy lifting. The tray and duplex unit stack up under the printer. The accessories fit together and attach to the printer with simple notches, and there are no separate cables to attach.

The 4500ıs color print quality was very good. It delivered deep, rich colors in charts and graphs and lots of detail in color photographic images. Black-and-white performance was not as good. Dark, low-contrast photos looked muddy and lacked detail. The 10-point and 12-point type commonly used in business documents looked good in black and white, but small 4-point and 6-point fonts took on a smeared appearance. Color text printed better, overall, than monochrome text on the 4500.

The Laserjet 4500 had no problems with registration. Registration is particularly important when printing color charts since programs like Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint have no built-in facilities for trapping.

HP Laserjet 4500

Xerox Docuprint C55mp

Xerox C55mp

The Xerox comes in a base configuration C55 ($3,500), which has just a parallel port and PCL5 driver. The C55mp ($4,500) has networking and Postscript printing built-in. In my view, color laser printers should always be purchased with network support and Postscript. Color lasers are too large and expensive to be used strictly for personal use, and Postscript is a necessity for quality color output.

The C55 has capacity for an additional paper tray and an optional hard disk drive for storing fonts and spooling print jobs. The printer has six megabytes of flash memory for firmware and four slots to add up to 64 megabytes of DRAM. The printer tested had 6 megabytes of flash memory and 24 megabytes of DRAM for a total of 30 megabytes.

Instead of toner cartridges, the C55mp uses toner bottles that must be shaken and then locked into place on the printer. You pour the toner into the machine through fill slots. This is a potentially messy process, and I had trouble with the black toner. The advantage of using bottles of toner is that you donıt have to replace a complicated and expensive toner cartridge every time you add toner to the printer. Toner bottles are simple, cheap and can be thrown away without guilt.

The C55mp also requires a bottle of fuser oil, a lubricant for the imaging drum. Xerox advises against moving the printer with an oil bottle in place and gives instructions for removing the bottle to avoid spillage.

In both monochrome and color mode, blacks were deep, rich and sharp down to the smallest point sizes. When printing out business graphics, the black line art was razor sharp.

The C55mp had the fastest initial processing times of all the printers tested. The first monochrome text page printed out in less than 23 seconds, versus 30 seconds and 40 seconds for the Laserjet 4500 and Panasonic KX-P8420, respectively. Color processing was also faster. The C55mp took 36 seconds to start printing color while the KX-P8420 took nearly a minute.

As fast as the C55mpıs processing time is, the printer engine is not as fast as the Laserjet 4500. Once the initial print processing is completed, youıre constrained only by the raw speed of the engine since the controller board is almost always faster than the mechanical components. The C55mp took more than seven minutes.

The C55 didnıt match the color quality of the 4500 either. Color graphics didnıt have the same sharpness or color accuracy as the printouts from the 4500. The halftone screens used to print in color were clearly visible on C55 printouts, even at 600 dpi. The coarse halftone screens were especially visible when printing charts and graphs. This hindered the printerıs ability to produce pure and saturated colors.

The C55ıs emulated PCL 5 driver was a disappointment. It was able to print text faster than the Postscript driver but color graphics were all but impossible to print. Text printed in conjunction with color graphics was printed incorrectly and the printer had problems rendering gray. All these problems went away when I switched to the Postscript driver. Xerox recommends the Postscript driver in preference to the PCL 5 driver. However, for some kinds of documents, particularly plain text documents, PCL printing is faster than Postscript.

With both the Postscript and PCL 5 drivers, the C55mp had serious registration problems when printing out color text. Red text would be surrounded by a yellow halo, blue text a purplish halo and so on. The problem only seemed to occur when printing text. The smearing was not apparent when printing any kind of non-text color graphics.

The C55mp has a couple of extra features designed to make the printer more convenient in an office environment. In addition to monochrome and color printing, the C55mp has what Xerox calls ıFast Blue.ı Fast blue is a two-color print mode with speeds in between those of monochrome and full color mode. There is also a ıFax Friendlyı mode that converts color printouts into monochrome halftones for faxing.

Finally -- of special interest to network administrators -- when the C55mp is connected to a network via TCP/IP, it can be administered using a Web browser. This improves the printerıs flexibility in mixed-platform environments and enables the printer to be used over the Internet and intranets in lieu of long distance faxing.

Panasonic KX-P8420

Options on the KX-P8420 include additional 500- and 250-sheet paper trays. In some configurations, a hard drive can be installed on the printer for storing fonts and for print job spooling. It comes standard with 16 megabytes of memory, but three 64-megabyte SIMMs can be installed for a total of 192 megabytes. The printer as tested came with 144 megabytes of memory and the hard disc drive.

The KX-P8420 was the easiest printer to set up. All four printer cartridges are easily accessible and can all be loaded at once.

The KX-P8420ıs engine has a simpler design and fewer moving parts than either the HP or the Xerox. This should lead to fewer printer jams, a longer useful life, faster print speeds and lower costs. In fact, although the Panasonicıs electronics were the slowest of the printers tested -- time to first page was 40 seconds for monochrome and 54 seconds for color -- the printer engine was nearly as fast as the Laserjet 4500.

The KX-P8420 took 7 minutes and 42 seconds to print 100 monochrome text pages, one minute longer than the Laserjet 4500. The difference was almost entirely due to the longer time it took for the KX-P8420 printer to start the first page. Once underway, the printers were about the same speed. There was less than a minuteıs difference between the P8430 and the Laserjet 4500 when printing out 23 pages of color charts and graphs.

The KX-P8420ıs output was not perfect, but it offered good quality in both color and monochrome mode. The KX-P8420 supports only Postscript printing, but it uses Postscript 3. Text printing was sharp in all type sizes. Color printing was clear and bright.

Of the four printers in the test, the KX-P8420 struck the best balance between color and black-and-white quality. Easy setup and long-lasting cartridges helped make this our favorite color laser and an Editorıs Choice for all-around printing versatility.

Panasonic KX-P8420

NEC 4400N

NEC 4400

In NECıs favor, there is a big difference in the speed of the electronics in the two printers. While the print engine speed seems to be about the same, the NEC 4400ıs electronics are much faster than the Panasonicıs. NECıs processor was able to cut the time needed to print the first page by nearly half for both color and black and white printing (28 versus 53 seconds color and 21 versus 40 seconds monochrome). The extra speed translated to an extra page per minute when printing long documents, putting it well ahead of the Panasonic in speed and in league with the HP and Xerox printers.

A handy feature of the 4400N (the network version of the 4400) is its browser-based administration. This will be appreciated by anyone who has ever had the job of configuring a printer from its control panel. Using a browser, a system administrator can change the printer settings from anywhere on a network. Plus, youıre spared the necessity of having to wade through multiple layers of printer menus and dozens of keystrokes to change a single printer setting.

The 4400N print driver supports printing across the Internet. Printing over the Internet is an excellent substitute for faxes.

The print quality of the NEC 4400 was excellent. Blacks were dark and clear, even at small point sizes. Color print from the 4400 tended to print lighter than on the other printers. Color photos were was less saturated than black. Light areas were bright, colorful and had excellent detail. Dark areas appeared to be printed in little more than black and white.

Halftone screens printed by the 4400 were visible on charts and graphs, and they gave color text a pixellated look. At smaller point sizes, the halftone broke up text, preventing it from appearing well formed.

The most serious problem with the 4400ıs printing was a tendency to leave smudges in both black and color. The smudges were random in size and shape. Another problem was the 4400ıs tendency to jam unless the paper was loaded just right. Not a serious problem but it indicates that the printer may be finicky when it comes to paper choice. The printer comes with a half-ream sample of 24lb bright white paper. If you can get paper that matches the sample, there shouldnıt be any jamming problems.

Which to Buy?

Color laser printers are still differentiated by printer engines. Three of the four printers we tested were quite different in their underlying design and print quality. The Hewlett-Packard Color Laserjet 4500 excelled in color quality, the Xerox C55mp and NEC 4400 excelled in monochrome printing and the Panasonic KX-P8420 struck a balance between the two.

Which printer you should pick depends on your intended use. With the high purchase price of a color laser printer, you should only consider one of these if you have an ongoing need for mid-range volumes of color. These models are a fit if you need several hundred or a few thousand color pages per month or if you print large volumes on a more sporadic basis.

If you already have a monochrome printer and are looking for an additional printer to add color capabilities, then the Laserjet 4500, with its superior color quality, is the best choice. If youıre looking to replace your existing monochrome printer then the C55, NEC 4400 or KX-P8420 are better choices. Of them, I preferred the KX-P8420 with its better color quality, especially its color text.

For overall performance, our Editorıs Choice goes to the Panasonic KX-P8420, which offers the best balanced design of the printers we tested. Itıs not as fast as the Laserjet 4500, the NEC 4400 or the C55mp, but it produces the best combination of text and color, giving you a versatile machine that can churn out black-and-white text and then switch to dazzling color for those special documents that need to look their best. U

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