Having a multifunctional color printer around the office certainly helps to pick up the pace when projects are due. The issue becomes, however, how much needs to be spent to get the quality and efficiency required without having a hunk of plastic sitting in the office when there are fewer smaller projects in the pipe line.

Are there substitutes?

Striking the even balance of having a multifunctional color printer around and sending out the bigger jobs is an age old issue. With Hewitt Packard (HP), however, there may be some comparison shopping to be done so that the office supplies and capital expenditures budgets do not get too depleted.

Depending upon the layout of a particular office there may not need to be a need for more than one multifunctional color printer. In some instances having a few lesser quality multifunctional printers available in a cube situation, with a lead unit as a center piece for larger projects, may be an option.

Cube top

In this instance, HP multifunctional color printers can range from $70.00 on up. Reviews suggest that the functions, on the lower cost machines, may require a bit more attention from the user but that they work well in situations that may just require a visual hard copy for inspection. The HP Office Jet 4315V may work in this situation. The unit was perceived to be slow (in the users' perception) and the scans could have been better. Each, however, was acceptable to a degree. The real "pain" was in the need to swap ink colors in and out depending upon need.The next step up but along the same lines, at $170.00, is the HP Office jet 7410. A workhorse of a printer by most accounts it provides hard copy with little effort. It does not shoot out the copy with remarkable speed but it does produce at a solid rate. Swapping out color and black ink continues to be an issue but for the given application this is less of an issue.

Upper end

The hp multifunctional color printer designed to meet a vast majority of office needs is the HP Jet Pro L7680. This unit offers all the bells and whistles that an office could want and was named Editors Choice by several computer magazines. Media card slots, hp OEM ink cartridge, filing options and 16 pages per minute page speed. For a unit that doubles the cost of the other smaller machines, at $358.00, this unit does the trick. Scanner and fax finish off the unit so that a complete system is included.

If the top end is desired the Laser Jet 3390 is available at $437.95. This unit includes the other options mentioned with solid performance characteristics. As a laser may suggest, paper throughput is high at 29 pages per minute.

Middle end

As is often the case a purchaser wants something in the middle. In this case, the HP Photo Smart 2575 XI may be the unit of choice. The unit is still fast and has all the features but at a varying level of sophistication.