Color printer prices drop.

COLOR PRINTER PRICES DROP

When it comes to color and computing, what you see is not necessarily what you get. While most of our PC screens display color, our printed pages are strictly black and white. That's mainly because high-quality color printers have been both too expensive and too impractical for general business use.

But color printers are now beginning to move beyond graphic-arts houses and computer-aided design shops into the mainstream of American business. The move has been triggered by a trio of "P" factors: price, presentations, and PostScript. Specifically, lower printer prices, higher expectations for business presentations, and the emergence of the PostScript page-description language as the standard in color printing have added new hues to office output.

Color PostScript printers still aren't cheap, but their prices have dropped below $10,000 and are tumbling toward $5,000, making it feasible for even small work groups to buy and share a unit, either on a network or at a common workstation. Among the more aggressively priced new entries …