Color-Blind? They're practically giving away color laser printers, but watch out for those toner prices.

Hard to believe, but there was a time when color laser printerscost $10,000 to $25,000. You really needed to be a graphic artsfirm to justify that kind of expense. But today, just about anyhome office can afford an even better printer. Color lasers arepopping up like eggs at Easter, with price tags as low as $400.

Of course, we're so accustomed to getting more for less inevery office product category that it's easy to overlook themagnitude of the accomplishment. But clearly, some kind ofaffordability threshold has been reached, and everything is comingup color.

"Around here, we use the analogy of a dam breaking,"says Vince Ferraro, vice president of Hewlett-Packard'sbusiness imaging and printing division in Boise, Idaho."That's how fast people are buying inexpensive colorlasers."

HP struck an important blow against the $1,000 barrier in 2003with its Color LaserJet 2500. Today, more than one-third of allcolor lasers carry sub-$1,000 stickers, according to imagingindustry research and analysis firm Lyra Research; and many, likeHP's newer, more capable LaserJet 2550, sell for half that.Over the next few years, you'll see low-end color print speeds(as opposed to faster monochrome speeds) accelerate from about 5ppm today to 10 to 23 ppm, says Larry Jamieson, senior analyst withNewtonville, Massachusetts- based Lyra Research. Expect comparableimprovements in duty cycles, memory amounts and paper-handlingoptions.

The news will only get better now that Dell is selling colorlasers, adds Jamieson. Currently, Dell claims a relatively smallmarket share of any printer type compared to Canon, Epson, Lexmarkand, of course, HP. But Dell is a spoiler, and its direct salesmodel will shake up the market, says Jennifer Thorwart, senioranalyst with IDC, based in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Dell, you'll recall, made its bones as aprice-slasher-basically, by cutting out the middlemen.It's not always the low-cost product producer; it doesn'teven build its own printers. But there's little doubt, saysThorwart, that Dell plans to deliver printers more cheaply than anycompetitor with a multilevel distribution model can.

Exhibits 1, 2 and 3 are Dell's first three colorlasers-the 3000cn, 3100cn and 5100cn. Before the ink haddried on the first print run, Dell had slashed their rock-bottomprices by 10 percent, to $449, $549 and $999, respectively. Dellclaims each is configured to give just a little more in eitherprint speed, duty cycle or paper handling than comparable HPmodels-the Color LaserJet 2550, 3550 and 4650, which can cost20 to 100 percent more.

Those are the wrong specs to measure, says Ferraro. HP boaststrue printer throughput, and its color quality and reliability havegarnered it A+ ratings by testers for more than a decade.That's why HP sells half of all color lasers.

Find Me the Money

It turns out that most of the cost of putting ink to paper is inthe toner cartridges you buy every six months or so. Jim Forrest,managing editor of The Hard Copy Supplies Journal, figures thatDell's entry into monochrome lasers and inkjets 18 months agodepressed ink prices by about 10 percent overall.

But the real money is in color laser supplies. The typical setof color cartridges (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) can cost $300to $800, depending on cartridge capacity, printer brand andmodel.

True, only a single-digit percentage of office printing involvescolor. But guess what? When people use color, they really usecolor, says Forrest, covering a lot more of a page than the 5percent that vendors use to develop their cost-per-pagecalculations.

At least you can count on toner cartridge prices to continue tofall for the foreseeable future, says Boris Elisman, HP vicepresident of marketing and sales in Cupertino, California. He saysHP consumables are about 30 percent cheaper this year than last.And now, Dell is challenging HP on that front, too. For example, a$308 set of replacement toner cartridges for Dell's 3100cn isabout $60 cheaper than a set for HP's LaserJet 2550. You'llpay $560 for Dell 5100cn toner, about $228 less than a LaserJet4650 cartridge set.

Notice that cartridge prices are about twice as high forhigh-end printers? That's because they carry twice the toner,usually rated to print 8,000 to 9,000 pages. Here again, though,vendors haven't yet agreed on a single way to measure colorpage coverage-and when they say, "Your results canvary," they really mean it. Still, when you have a choice,larger capacity cartridges are usually the better buy, saysForrest.

How about aftermarket cartridges? Are they as good as originalequipment? Printer makers would disagree, but there are only smallconvenience or feature trade-offs in third-party cartridges, saysForrest. Ink is ink.

Mike Hogan is BIZ Experiences's technology editor.Contact him at .