C762n

The Lexmark C762n is fairly inexpensive for a colour laser designed to serve a high-output office with a wide variety of printing needs. This model has truly extensive paper-handling options that turn it from a simple colour laser into a one-machine printing station. Options include a five-bin collater, a 3000-sheet finisher for such touches as stapling and collating, up to three 500-sheet paper trays, a hefty 2000-sheet paper tray, a wireless print server, and a variety of other media trays. You can even turn the C762n into a multifunction device by just popping a scanner on the top of the printer.

Of course, once you've fully decked out the basic version, you'll have paid significantly more than its attractive starting price, but the C762n's versatility is an asset if you do want to expand your printer's capabilities. The printer even comes standard with a 500MHz processor and 128MB of RAM, which should keep most office print jobs moving along smoothly, and you can expand the RAM up to 512MB.

Though this model has options to meet the needs of almost any office, its performance was less impressive. The device, which uses a single-pass design, printed text at 16.1 pages per minute and colour graphics at 4.9ppm.

The C762n's print quality, while generally good, didn't wow us either. It printed text very well, as most colour lasers do, with fine, dark letters. The narrow parallel lines in our line-art test looked straight and showed no banding, but the finer lines tended to merge together into a solid box. Our black-and-white photograph exhibited a bluish cast, though it looked mostly smooth and well textured. Printed colour photographs were light enough, but had somewhat garish colours and skin tones.