HP's Color LaserJet CP1518ni is a low-cost colour laser printer with a decent design.

However, it's not the quickest and has limited paper handling, so the HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni may be best suited for use in a home or a fairly small office.

In our tests, the HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni produced plain text pages at a paltry 11.2 pages per minute (9ppm) and graphics pages at 2ppm or slower.

At least the results were pleasing: text looks black and crisp. Although a little dark, photos look reasonably natural. Grayscale images are free of the green or pink overtones that we often see. HP's own image enhancement technology, called ImageREt 3600 technology, might have helped here: among other tricks, it manipulates the size and position of the dot within the usual resolution grid, to give images a smoother, more natural look.

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The ‘All-in-One' cartridge technology also enables users to lower their ongoing running costs. With this technology the Intermediate Transfer Unit, Photosensitive Drum, and Waste Toner Container are combined in one unit, resulting in fewer consumables to stock, low maintenance and reduced running costs.

The LBP-3100 also features High Speed USB 2.0 connectivity for fast data transfer and to ensure quick printing and energy reduction, the Laser Shot LBP-3100 has adopted Canon's On-Demand Fixing System for low power consumption and quick start-up.

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There’s a lot of talk about ink cartridges these days - the cost, disposal, recycling. What many people are overlooking is the opportunity to conserve. HP hasn’t overlooked this notion and has come out with the new Photosmart D5463 Printer which can help save ink.

The Photosmart D5463 Printer is an everyday printer for the home that provides lab quality photos and pristine laser-quality documents. The HP website points all the fact that the printer has all kinds of nifty features, including a “3.8 cm colour display, memory card slots, HP Smart Web Printing, and an auto-engaging photo tray, making printing photos and photo projects effortless. The HP Photosmart D5463 Printer also prints photos and text directly on CDs and DVDs.”

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Laser printers are one of the heavyweights of the office. Every time there is a fault, a sweaty, groaning engineer needs to be called in. Once they have a home, they just don’t want to be moved anywhere. Ricoh is tackling such clichés head on. With their Aficio SP 3300D, they have managed to create a laser printer which measures 36 x 37 x 21cm and weighs less than 9kg. Although that doesn’t quite make it small enough to use with the laptop, it is light enough to be moved without having to call in reinforcements.

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There's quite a trend among printer makers to produce bigger, heavier-weight inkjets to challenge the dominance of laser printers in offices. First HP and now Epson with its B-500DN, have produced machines claimed to be as cheap to run and nearly as fast as equivalent lasers, but with the bonus of better colour quality and lower energy use.

To be kind to the B-500DN, you would say that it had unconventional styling. To be accurate, you would say it was a monolithic printer with a big square bulge. That bulge holds the four ink cartridges and, given their size, it's hard to see where else in the printer's case they could go.

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If you don't need color, monochrome lasers are still the workhorse printer of choice for an office. The lack of color, however, rules them out for dedicated or near-dedicated photo printing or for home use, which also assumes the ability to print photos.

There are no monochrome lasers small enough to serve as mobile printers, but some are smaller than many inkjets, making them potentially good choices for a personal printer. As with color lasers, there are other technologies, notably LED printers, that are similar enough so all the comments here about monochrome lasers apply to those printers as well. (There are no monochrome solid-ink printers.)

It's easy to find a single function mono laser that's small enough to fit on your desk without dominating your desktop. It's a little harder, but still possible, to find an all-in-one (AIO) that's small enough to fit comfortably on a desk too. Prices start at well below $200 for a single-function printer, and a little less than $250 for an AIO.

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Make your own Tattoos using your inkjet or laser printer.

Have you always fancied having a tattoo but didn’t want to have to go through the pain of having one done. Now you can have as many painless tattoos as you like by just using your inkjet or laser printer. Print off any designs on to the special tattoo paper including photos or even your own drawings and transfer them to any body part in minutes. The tattoo paper is so easy to use and tattoos can easily last for up to a week before they wash off. You can mix and match designs and even have a different tattoo every week of the year!

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The most popular printers tend to be all-singing, all-dancing ‘multifunction’ devices with a built-in scanner and copier, and some even have wireless networking and other fancy features.

However, Lexmark has gone right back to basics with the Z2320, it being a good low-cost printer that will appeal to home users on a tight budget.

The Z2320 is a conventional inkjet printer but it costs just £40 and provides good quality for both black and white and colour printing.

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It's disturbing to see trees being felled to make paper, worse when most of us just print on one side of the sheet. Although duplex printing function is slowly being introduced into more inkboxes, we still have to buy more paper when the tray is empty.

This shouldn't pose a problem for Toshiba which has developed the B-SX8R. This printer can erase the contents on the paper, ready to be printed on again. The revolutionary idea works on the basis that certain mixtures of pigments change color when heated to a particular temperature. This is different from the technology Xerox employed by using ink that fades after a period of time.

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Inkjet printing is the only technology that cuts across all the usage categories we look at in this story. Some models are meant for home use, some are aimed at offices, some are meant to print nothing but photos, and some are designed for mobile printing, complete with batteries. Most inkjets are meant as personal printers or, at most, shared printers for printing a few pages per day. The vast majority are small enough to share a desk with the rest of your home or home-office set up.

That said, the technology is showing up in more and more printers meant for heavier-duty printing, including, at the extreme, HP's floor-standing Edgeline models with five-figure price tags. These are very much the exception, however. Many, if not most, inkjets don't even have a published duty cycle, and for those that do, the ratings are laughably low compared with lasers, often measured in a few thousand pages over the lifetime of the printer. The maximum paper capacity in inkjets is often as low as 100 sheets, and rarely more than 300 sheets.

Almost any current inkjet can print photos that at least match the quality you'd expect from your local drugstore. The few exceptions are primarily among printers aimed at offices, but even most office inkjets do a decent job with photos. If you pick carefully, you can find all-purpose inkjets whose output rivals photo printers meant for professional photographers.

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