Printers: inkjet printers rule, but consider lasers for big jobs.(Computers, Phones, and Peripherals: Portable and Versatile)(Buyers guide)

Inkjet printers have become the standard for home-computer use. They can turn out color photos nearly indistinguishable from lab-processed photos, along with banners, stickers, transparencies, T-shirt transfers, and greeting cards. Many produce excellent black-and-white text. With some very good models selling for less than $200, it's no surprise that inkjets account for the vast majority of printers sold for home use.

Laser printers still have their place in home offices. If you print reams of black-and-white text documents, you probably need the quality, speed, and low per-copy cost of a laser printer. Printers use a computer's microprocessor and memory to process data. The latest inkjets and lasers are so fast partly because computers have become more powerful and contain much more memory than before.

WHAT'S AVAILABLE

The printer market is dominated by a handful of well-established brands. Hewlett-Packard is the market leader. Other major brands include Brother, Canon, Dell, Epson, Kodak and Lexmark. Printers designed for printing 4x6-inch snapshots are also sold by Olympus, Samsung, and Sony.

The type of computer a printer can serve depends on its ports. All printers have a Universal Serial Bus (USB) port that lets a printer connect to Windows or Macintosh computers. Some have FireWire ports, and many printers also have optional Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or infrared connectivity. PictBridge lets you connect a camera directly to a printer, and some models will download photos right off your camera's memory card.

Inkjet printers. Inkjets use droplets of ink to form letters, graphics, and photos. Some printers have one cartridge that holds the cyan (greenish-blue), magenta, and yellow inks, and a second cartridge for the black ink. Others have an individual cartridge for each color. For photos, many inkjets also have additional cartridges that contain lighter shades of cyan and magenta inks, or gray ink.

Most inkjet printers output black-and-white text at a speed of 2 to 9 pages per minute (ppm) but are much slower for color photos. Various models we tested took 2 to over 20 minutes to print a single 8x10, depending on the complexity of the image. The cost of printing a black-and-white text page with an inkjet varies considerably from model to model, from 2 to 12 cents. The cost of printing a color 8x10 photo can range from 85 cents to $2.30. Printer price: $60 to $700. You can also get them with scanning, copying, and sometimes fax capability. Those all-in-one models typically cost more than stand-alone inkjets. Price: $80 and up.