A good quality laser printer is still an essential for any office where printing is required. Today's inkjet printers can easily match laser printers in terms of text quality, crispness, and even speed, but no inkjet can compare to even a low-end laser printer in that most important of benchmarks, price. Laser printers have considerably lower CPP (Cost Per Page) values due to their large reservoirs of toner and more efficient printing process.

Here at PCstats, we consider business computing equipment to be as important as the latest 'enthusiast' computer gear when it comes to reviews. We work in an office ourselves, and we know how difficult it can be to find reliable unbiased information in the less-than-sexy area of reliable business equipment. We've taken a look at several laser printers over the last few months, and today we're pleased to have another one in-house.

The Hewlett-Packard Laserjet 2420dn model that we're looking at is a networked monochrome laser printer with a 1200x1200 maximum resolution, 64MB of onboard memory (expandable to 320MB), 350 sheet paper capacity, a built-in HP JetDirect Ethernet print server, automatic duplex printing and a price tag of about CAN$1049 (US$899).

HP LaserJet 2420DN Networked Laser Printer Includes: Users Manual, quick-start guide, starter toner, software, power cord. *No USB, network, or printer cables included. Further Technical Details: - 1200x1200dpi resolution - 30ppm black / 8.5ppm duplex - Cold start time less than 10 seconds - 64MB of onboard memory, 320MB maximum - Automatic duplex printing mode - Weight: 36 lbs - Dimensions: 16.7" x 15.7" x 10.2" high - Power consumption: 625 watts printing, 11 watts idle. - Font support: HP PCL 6, PCL 5e, PS3 emulation, direct PDF printing v 1.3 (with at least 128 MB of printer memory) - Connectivity: USB 2.0, IEEE 1284-B parallel, 10/100 Base TX Ethernet HP Jetdirect embedded print server, EIO slot. - Operating systems: Win9X, NT4.0, Me, 2000, XP - Paper: 250 sheet cassette paper tray for letter to legal size, 100 sheet multi-purpose feeder for A4/letter/legal/envelope. 350 sheet total capacity (optional 500 sheet tray). Works with transparencies, bond, recycled, labels, envelopes, cardstock, etc. Consumables: - Starter cartridges rated for 6000 sheets at 5% coverage for ~$140CDN - Hi-yield cartridges rated for 12000 sheets at 5% coverage for ~$230CDN

For a non-home office, a networked laser printer should be considered a requirement. While technically any printer can be networked by installing it on a networked system and sharing it, the actual process of doing this can be cumbersome and inefficient for more than a few PCs.

For one thing, having a PC between the printer and the rest of the network adds an extra layer of complexity and potential hardware failure.

For another thing, unless you have a fast PC which you can afford to use as a dedicated print server, whoever uses the PC attached to the printer is going to be constantly interrupted with printer issues as well as suffering slower performance from the overhead that print serving imposes.

It is far better to pay the small premium and get a printer with networking properties. These devices have a built in network adaptor, allowing computers on your network to communicate directly with the printer and making printer sharing unnecessary. Printers like the HP 2420DN take that one step further by incorporating a full networked print server.