What possibly is surprising for a lot of people who do buy basic colour lasers is how expensive the little things can be to run. For one thing, they often ship with "starter" cartridges, with roughly a third or a half the toner of normal cartridges. It tends to give the unwary quite a nasty shock when the well quickly runs dry. For another, as a general rule, per page costs improve in direct relation to the initial hardware cost, so a more expensive printer could end up being a wiser purchase in the long run.

It can be all but impossible to make accurate calculations, unofortunately, due to the curiously elastic nature of printer manufacturers' mathematics. Printer maths could be a worthy topic for a thesis, possibly by consumer protection authorities. They have a curious tendency towards wild inflation (print speed, output yield) or startling underestimation (cost per page etc.) The only consistency is that they always favour the manufacturer, and mislead the consumer. We suspect they're the same mathematics used in the planned or optimal world.

What is clear is that colour lasers are much more economical than inkjet printers. The cartridges cost more, but they produce thousands more pages … although not as many pages as the manufacturers suggest in their specifications.

The advantages of colour laser printers over inkjets are real, however. Laser prints are less likely to smear, and they do a better job of printing fine details in graphics. While inkjets produce much better photos - a function of ink technology as much as resolution - the colour laser output is perfectly good enough for newsletters and business documents.

That, of course is how the Bleeding Edge Semi-Commercial Printery came into existence. The ability to turn out impressive documents and promotional material in small print runs justified the investment even for a small business.
Typically, we took the cheapest possible way out of the dull world of monochrome printing when we picked up a reconditioned HP Colour LaserJet 2840 network printer, scanner, copier and fax unit at Grays Online for about $600 delivered – about a third of the new price. (We're told that HP is running a cash-back offer right now that allows you to buy a new one for roughly the same price.)

The purchase introduced us to a whole new world of fascinating new problems. We discovered, for instance, that while our bargain printer was happy to churn out perfectly acceptable colour documents from most of our
applications, Adobe Acrobat files seemed to cause it immense embarrassment. We could tell this from the fact that every PDF file we sent to it came out with a red wash that we interpreted as the digital
equivalent of a blush.

It took quite some time to work out the cause, which turned out to be one of those oh-so-common collaborative efforts between different companies. In this case, Hewlett Packard and Adobe adjusted a feature that was designed to correct one problem – a white background appearing as yellow for instance – to create another: a white background printing as red.

To fix it, you have to select “Printer Setup” from Acrobat’s File menu, and under Advanced, turn off “Discoloured Background Correction”.

What we also discovered was that the LaserJet 2840 is an extremely noisy printer. Not only does it create a racket whenever it’s asked to produce any work, it also regularly starts itself up at odd hours, for a little session of brass band practice.

There a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, it's a so-called carousel printer (we swear we can hear the little horses going around and around inside), which uses complicated mechanics to rotate the cartridges in the printing process. In-line printers, where the toners are lined up in a straight line, and the paper takes a direct path across all four toners, are faster, less prone to failure and vastly quieter.

The solution we came up with was to stick the 2840 in a well-ventilated cupboard, but we're less than impressed with the HP Toolbox software, which seems to give the 2840 disturbing fidgets at regular intervals.

Another issue with the LaserJet 2840 – and for that matter all colour laser printers in the small office and low-end of the workgroup range, is that colour printing is undeniably addictive. The Bleeding Edge Institute for Computer Sociology has identified this phenomenon in the past, and dubbed it "Colour Creep". Colour Creep means that once you start printing with colour, you quickly discover a latent, all but uncontrollable desire to print or photocopy everything – absolutely everything – in colour.

We found, when one of the colour cartridges convinced itself that it was empty, fitting it out with three new colour and one black cartridge would cost us roughly what we'd paid for the entire system, and we were well short of the yield suggested by Hewlett Packard.

We suspect that we're going to opt, instead for refills, which are considerably cheaper. We'd be interested in readers' experience with refilled colour cartridges. Do they effect the output, or compromise the printer?

We're also looking at a couple of more expensive alternatives: the HP LaserJet CP3505dn, and the Xerox Phaser 8560. We'd welcome reader experiences on those or competing models. We know you're itching to send us some coloured presentations on the topic, but really, a simple email would do.