A Tale of Two Printers

Marketing hype aside, the best new inkjets still fall short of laser quality and speed.

When I first saw Hewlett-Packard's DeskJet 1100dtn at Staples earlier this year, I thought that it would make the perfect replacement for my aging HP LaserJet 5MP. Indeed, it was the first inkjet printer I had ever seen that made me seriously think I could do without a laser.

Inkjet printers are of course the fool's gold of quality office printing machines. After all, inkjet printers never live up to their specificationsright? But the 1100dtns specs were so amazing that even if they were off by 50 percent, the printer would still be a great bargain. According to HP, this $299 printer could print 23 pages per minute black-and-white, or 20 ppm in color. The printer that I wanted to replace, my six-year-old laser, churns out only 8 ppm. The 1100dtn also has a built-in duplexer, allowing it to automatically print both sides of each page. Even better, the 1100dtn had a built-in HP print server, allowing me to hook it into my network and print to it from my Macs, my PCs, and even my Unix-based computers. (If you dont need the Ethernet you can save $100 by ordering the 1100d for just $199.)

These prices made me sit up and take notice. I had long wanted a networked printer with a built-in duplexer. I had been eyeing HPs LaserJet 2300dn, which goes for $1,100. I admit it: even though Brother sells a networked duplexing printer for $400 less, I wanted the HP because Ive had such good luck with the HP brand: in my 15 years of owning HP printers, I have never had one fail on me.

When I told my father about my plans, he cautioned me that the high cost of replacement ink cartridges makes inkjets much more expensive to operate than laser printers. There's some truth to that, but it turns out that the price differential really only becomes significant if you are printing a lot of photographs.

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To prove my point to Dad, I ran the numbers. The standard black cartridge for the 1100dtn costs $33.99 and yields 1,430 printed black-and-white pages, according to HP, for a printing cost of 2.4 cents per page. On the other hand, cartridges for HPs new 2300-series laser printers cost $119.99 and deliver 6,000 pages, for an effective price of just 2.0 cents per page. Print 5,000 pages on the inkjet and youll pay an extra $20 for the privilege. Of course, since the 2300dtn costs $700 more than the 1100dtn, you wont see the laser's operating cost savings until youve printed 175,000 pages.

When I got the 1100dtn home to review, I wasnt disappointed. It's much faster than other inkjets that Ive used. And the print quality was astoundingly good. But over the next month, as I printed several thousand pages and did a variety of comparison tests between the inkjet and my laser, I became increasingly dissatisfied.