My first laser printer was the HP LaserJet Series II. At the time it cost over $2,600 and was billed as the first mass market printer. That LaserJet II just wouldn't die. It worked doggedly for years, and then, just because inkjets offered color, we laid it to rest. Fast forward more than a decade, and, after careful deliberation, my husband and I just bought a color laser printer, a Samsung CLP-510. We paid $230, and it works like a charm for our printing needs—maybe you fit the profile as well.

Are you an infrequent but high volume printer?

Because my husband has a small business that prints occasional but sizable documents, the inkjet wasn't doing the trick. Each time he readied himself to print documentation, the jets on the ink nozzles were clogged, probably because it hadn't been used for a while. By the time he finished futzing with the jets and getting it to print smoothly, he'd depleted half of an ink cartridge. Highly frustrating and kind of expensive.

Does speed count?

When you're printing a three-page color document, an inkjet seems speedy enough, but if you're doing 50 or 60 pages at once, your patience will wear thin if you stand by the inkjet and wait for the job to be done (never mind the paper jams). Laser printers have a much higher throughput, perfect for long documents.

Do you fret about the cost of consumables?

Inkjets are notorious for printing gorgeous photo-quality images but really chewing up your ink supply. A low-end color laser doesn't do a great job on color photos, but it's perfectly adequate for charts, graphs, logos, and spot color. The only hitch? The Samsung requires four toner cartridges that will cost about $250 to replace if we replace all four of them—that's more than we paid for the printer. But we're hoping we're mostly replacing the black toner.

Do you need print over photo quality?

Inkjet printing has become very clear and high resolution, but there's something about a laser quality text document that's, well, laser sharp.

Do you do a lot of duplex printing?

Sure, inkjets can print on both sides of the paper, but those paper feeds can be finicky. For large documents there's nothing like a laser printer with duplex printing.

We still use our inkjet for photo printing, and we wouldn't ever think of doing without one. But for quality, speed, and low cost per copy you may want to consider a color laser printer.

Other laser printers you might want to look at:

Dell Laser Printer 3100-cn

Lexmark C510-n

For more laser printer reviews, see PC World