A few weeks ago Nigel Harris's desktop laser printer gave up the ghost. Here he talks us through the through process of finding a replacement.

My printer sits next to my screen and gets some fairly heavy use at certain times of the year as I tend to print a lot of company accounts and the top copies of Self Assessment tax returns. I also like to print my own invoices direct from our time and fees system, so I need an easy way to switch between plain paper and printed invoices. I don't need colour.

There are a lot of options to consider, but some of the decisions are easy - it has to be a laser. Inkjet printers may be OK for low volume, occasional use, but they just don't look professional. A basic laser printer is barely more expensive and the output looks 1,000 times better.

Once you've made that choice, lasers come in four flavours:
1. Very basic - cheapest, but too flimsy for my use.
2. Desktop printers, in a range of prices to reflect speed and print quality.
3. Networked printers - ideal if you share printers as these can be plugged into a spare network point and don't need to run off a PC. You can share another person's local printer, but their computer needs to be switched on and logged on to the network, so if they are not in you could be stuck.
4. Workgroup printers - these are the big networked versions, designed for high volumes, so they tend to have huge paper trays, often several so that plain paper and letterheads can always be on tap. They have fast print speeds and are expensive.

The second type was what I needed. But which make and model? Over the years we have tried other makes but consistently come back to HP as reliable office printers that don't cost the earth to run. I started my search at HP's 'Help me choose a printer [1] guide. This is a good place to get an overview of what's available as the multiple choice questions tell you what the available options are:

• Black and white or colour?




• Print only, or scan/copy fax too?




• Print volume - up to 150 pages, or as many as 50,000 per month?




• Network or wireless connection?




• Maximum paper size - do you want to print A3?




• Extras - do you want automatic double-sided (duplex) printing, or an additional paper tray?




• Budget? £100/£250/£500+

I worked out I needed to spend £75 to £185 for a simple desktop mono laser printer capable of handling up to 1,000 pages a month. Print speeds were quoted at 17-24ppm (pages per minute).

Adding duplex capability and a maximum price of £250 I ran a second search. This pushed the price up to £159-£209, but also the speed to 27ppm. Lifting my price limit again for the same spec only raised the top price to £269, but I still couldn't get a second paper tray as standard.

Increasing the print volume option to up to 5,000 pages per month I was offered the HP LaserJet P2015d (d for duplex) at £159, which seems like a good deal for 27ppm. The faster P3005d costs an extra £170 to get 35ppm - I might as well buy two P2015 printers and get two times 27ppm! The P2015dn adds a network card, which I don't want, and more importantly adds around £60 to the price.

I had a look at colour lasers just out of interest. For some reason the HP guide refused to offer me any colour lasers at the sort of print volumes I envisage, just the cheap DeskJet inkjet colour printers. The HP laser printer home page shows office colour lasers at between £174 and just over £500. The main issue here is print speed - the cheapest one runs at only 8ppm even for just black, and is really designed for occasional use only, while the top model manages a respectable 30ppm. Anyway, I don't need colour myself. We have a central colour laser printer on the network for occasional use if I need it.

Where to compare and buy different makes?
When it comes to buying I find Dabs.com [2] usually has good prices and has most models in stock. Dabs has an HP 2015d for £12 less than buying direct from HP. Running a comparison of HP, Samsung, Epson and Lexmark printers around £150 there was quite a similarity in spec. All came with network cards. Print speeds were 20-22ppm, but print resolution was either 600dpi (dots per inch) on the faster Lexmark or 1,200 dpi on the others. Interestingly, HP is the only manufacturer of the four not to include a parallel port as well as USB - while most existing PCs still have a parallel port it seems a good idea to try to use it and keep the USB ports free for other uses. I already have 6 USB devices on my desk competing for four ports.

Moving up to around £200 gave me duplex printing on six of the seven printers I selected, and print speeds in the upper 20s. These are more workhorses than the cheaper desktop printers, with paper trays holding 250-300 sheets, compared with just 150 for the cheaper models. The HP and Epson AcuLaser have a flip-out 50 sheet "multi-purpose" tray, which is extremely handy for printing onto a small batch of printed stationery, for example invoices, or the occasional envelope. Others just have a by-pass slot that requires you to manually feed in individual sheets.

Push the budget to £300 and you have serious workgroup printers like the OKI B6200n with a 1,500 sheet paper tray with 24ppm and 1,200dpi and a monthly duty cycle of 50,000 - 99,999 pages - tempting, but not really a desktop unit.

Getting back to earth, the HP P2015 is recommended for print volumes of 750 to 3000 pages per month, which suits me, and in addition we already have a couple of these in the office so we don't need to carry a huge number of different toner cartridges in stock. But is it the most economical to run?

Calculating costs in use
Print cost is harder to ascertain. There's no information on printer cartridge cost or capacity on Dab's website, but it is listed against each toner cartridge on the manufacturer's website. The P2015 cartridge is good for 3,000 standard pages, calculated in accordance with the ISO/IEC 19752 standard, which gives a cost per page of just 1.3p, or just over 1p with the high-capacity cartridge - both well below my 2p per page target. Cartridges for the OKI B6200n are much more expensive - presumably because they hold more toner as the printer is designed to cope with much higher volumes - but still work out at 1.25p per page based on the (less reliable) manufacturer's estimate, based on 5% per page coverage.

Conclusion - the continuity choice
I went for the HP P2015. It does what I need it to do, I got a good price, and we already have a stock of toner cartridges. The flip out second tray is ideal to print a stack of invoices, and print speed is quite acceptable for large sets of accounts or tax returns.