Colour printers are all very well, but how do you avoid staff making wasteful (and expensive) use of colour when black and white would be fine for most applications? Traditionally, the answer has been to have very few colour printers in a professional office, and as a consequence they are seldom used and so tend to be low specification inkjet printers. But for those occasions when colour would add something special to a professional report or presentation you really need a high resolution laser printer. Nigel Harris explains the options.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to have the best of both worlds?

The clever people at HP have come up with the perfect solution in the form of Colour Access Controls. The HP Color Laserjet 3000 and 3800 [1] printers, at prices from only £439, come with built-in software controls that allow you to decide who can print in colour and who gets just black ink. Or you can set the restriction by application, so, for example, emails can only be printed with black ink while Powerpoint slides will always be printed in full colour. In an accounting practice you can therefore afford to make one of these workgroup printers your central printer, while controlling access so that all those SA Tax Returns are printed economically only in mono and not in glorious technicolour. The HP software also produces management reports to track colour usage or usage by application, user or specific jobs.