Recently Tom’s Hardware did another one of their excellent reports on printers, this time taking a look at a couple of color laser printers. Printer manufacturers have been trying to make color laser printers more mainstream over the past few years, so they have lowered their prices and marketed them towards regular customers. As usual, HP machines are the most common, but there are still a fair number of competitors.

In this comparison, they took a look at the HP Color LaserJet 2600n, Color LaserJet 3600, the Konica Minolta Magicolor 5430DL and the Lexmark C522n. A lot of people have probably never even seen a Konica Minolta machine, while the LaserJet 2600 is probably available in every major office store out there. That doesn’t mean that one is necessarily better than the other, but if you are interested in the Magicolor, you are probably going to have to order it.

Not surprisingly, the Lexmark machine performed the worst. They liked the design of it, but the bad performance negated the positives. They liked the Konica Minolta for its low costs per page and its solid speeds, but it lost points for its clunky design (it weighed it at 92 pounds). The Color LaserJet 2600n was impressive for its speed, but the long term costs of owning it are very high. The Color LaserJet 3600 came out as the winner, as it had the best balance of performance and cost.

One important piece of data they used to compare these machines was the cost of printing out 10,000 pages:

Color LaserJet 2600n - $755.79
Color LaserJet 3600 - $344.09
Magicolor 5430DL - $354.60
Lexmark C522n - $575.93

Out of the 10,000 pages, 70% were black and 30% were color. This data is important because it allows you to look at the whole picture and not just the initial cost of the printer. The Color LaserJet 2600n is relatively cheap for a color laser printer, but you can see that whatever you save initially will definitely be wiped out in a matter of time.

Color Laser Printers: Fast and Affordable! [Tom’s Hardware]