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Toss-up: black-and-white laser printers

Sometimes, a monochrome laser printer is the best way to churn out long essays, school assignments and business reports.

Inkjet printers produce great photos but they're expensive to run, especially when you're printing only black-and-white text. If you're churning out long school assignments or business reports, a monochrome laser printer could be a wise investment that will soon pay for itself. Then you can reserve your colour inkjet printer for producing photos, colour charts and the few pages of the report that demand it.

It may sound strange to consider having two printers, but colour inkjet printers tend to slowly chew through the colour ink even when you're printing text or if they use multiple cartridges. This is partly because they clean the heads and waste ink on start-up.

Printing a lot of text documents can be expensive.

You'll find USB-only mono laser printers cheaper than these two but, for the extra money, you get both USB and wi-fi connectivity (plus the Fuji Xerox adds ethernet).

This makes it easy to connect the printers to your home network and share them with other devices.


Even if you won't use the network features today, it's worth considering whether you'll need them in future. You'll also find apps for printing from hand-held gadgets.

The Fuji Xerox is a little more expensive but it's also more of a workhorse than the HP. The Fuji Xerox's paper tray holds more sheets - 250 A4 pages compared with 150 - and it prints much faster at 30 pages a minute compared with 18.

Automatic duplexing is the feature that really sets them apart. The Fuji Xerox can automatically print on both sides of the page, helping you to save paper; the HP requires you to turn the paper over yourself and put it back in the tray.

The verdict

Even if you're not tempted by its faster printing speeds, the Fuji Xerox's automatic duplexing makes it the best choice.

HP LaserJet P1102w

Fuji Xerox P255 dw