Last Friday Brother introduced its new multifunctional inkjet printer — the MFC-6490CW.

This printer is the first in a new line of “Professional Series” printers. It is also first Brother’s color inkjet to print, copy, scan, and fax on 11 x 17-inch tabloid sized paper.

The MFC-6490CW can print at speeds of up to 35 ppm in black, 28 ppm in color at up to 600 x 1200-dpi resolution. When copying, you can achieve speed of up to 23 copies per minute in black, 20 in color. The scanning unit supports resolutions up to 19200 dpi

The printer uses 4 separate color ink cartridges for imaging.

The Brother MFC-6490CW is well-equipped: it has a 50 sheet Automatic Document Feeder, dual paper trays that can hold up to 400 sheets, and Super G3 33.6Kbps fax modem.

You can connect this printer via USB 2.0, but it also supports Ethernet and 802.11g-compatible Wi-Fi connectivity.

The MFC-6490CW has a built-in 3.3-inch widescreen display and allows for direct photo printing from digital camera media cards, USB flash drives or PictBridge-enabled cameras.

The printer is TWAIN-compliant and compatible with Mac OS X 10.2.4 or later. The bundled software includes Presto PageManager OCR.

The printer is available at an estimated street price of $299.

1. DELL 3000cn

Among all the printer reviews, this one tops the list with a good margin. This compact, 25 ppm monochrome, 5 ppm color printer has a 2400×600 dpi resolution. The DELL 3000cn measures about 16.7×16.5×17 inches and weighs approximately 53 pounds. It has excellent color laser output quality as well as expandability. It is also compatible with Windows, Mac as well as Linux systems. Even small sized fonts are easily readable due to the superior quality of print. Its starter toner print cartridges come with a speed of 2000 pages for black and white and 1000 pages for color printouts. What makes it top the list are its superior quality of text as well as good, solid graphics – all at a very reasonable price.

2. Oki printing solutions C3400n

This printer is high on speed with 20 black and white pages printed per minute and 16 color pages every minute. It has a resolution capacity teaching online course dpi. It has about 4 print cartridges with a capacity of 1000 pages each. What places it second on the list is its speed and reasonably good text and graphics, all of which come at a surprisingly affordable price.

3. Brother HL 2700CN

This color laser printer is aimed primary for office usage as opposed to home use. It has a monochrome speed of 31 ppm and color of 8 ppm. The Brother HL 2700CN comes with starter toner print cartridges teaching online course a shelf life of 5000 pages for black and white and 3000 pages for three colors. What sets this one apart are the presence of both parallel and USB 2.0 and even 10/100TX networking ability.

4. Lexmark C510

This small office beauty prints with exceptional color and sharpness. Especially targeted at small business groups, the Lexmark online interior design course color laser printer provides plenty of features at a very affordable price. The printer comes in three varieties, has a mono speed of 30 ppm, 8 ppm color speed and is much faster than any other pure monochrome printers.

5. Samsung CLP500

With sharpness and brilliance in its printing as well as good mono and color speeds of 20 and 5 ppm respectively, this color laser printer comes at a reasonable price. It has a color resolution of 1200×600 dpi, good tarot card reading quality and is quieter compared to its counterparts. The Samsung CLP500 has a print capacity of about 600 sheets, has a 64 MB memory, has both parallel and USB 2.0. The downer for this one is its bulky appearance (it measures 20×18.5×16 inches) and heavy weight (approximately 80 pounds). It’s best suited for people for whom color quality is paramount and not so much the volume of work.

Dutch marketing and communications company Spranq has developed a typeface they claim can save up to 20 percent of ink costs by reducing the amount of ink used on a page. The typeface is called Ecofont and is based on Verdana

Here’s what it looks like:

The company says about the font:

The prints we make for our ‘daily use’ not only use paper, but also ink. According to SPRANQ creative communications (Utrecht, The Netherlands) your ink cartridges (or ink toner) could last longer. SPRANQ has therefore developed a new font: the Ecofont.

“After Dutch holey cheese, there now is a Dutch font with holes as well.”

Appealing ideas are often simple: how much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability? After extensive testing with all kinds of shapes, the best results were achieved using small circles. After lots of late hours (and coffee) this resulted in a font that uses up to 20% less ink.

20 percent is not bad, isn’t it? However, the developer point out that actual savings depend on two factors:

• the smaller the fontsize, the lower the saving
• the type and age of the used printer

The typeface can be freely downloaded Ecofont Website

Konica Minolta has just launched is smallest color laser printer the magicolor 1650EN. This new compact printer not only produces high quality laser printouts but also is extraordinarily quiet. It comes in three flexible configurations with full network compatibility making this an ideal solution for home or small offices.

Equipped with the Emperon print controller for straightforward integration into any network – Windows, Mac or Linux – the magicolor 1650EN is compatible with common printer protocols such as PCL and PostScript (PS). The secret behind the outstanding print quality is Konica Minolta’s state-of-the-art printing technology. Konica Minolta’s Simitri HD toner takes credit for crisp texts as well as bright and UV light resistant, long-lasting colors.

Designed with the user in mind, the color laser printer is available in three different configurations, from a standard model to the duplex model magicolor 1650EN-d. The magicolor 1650EN-d comes with a standard duplex unit plus a lower paper feeder for additional paper supply making this the ideal solution for those that print regular large print jobs.

All models come with 256 MB of memory and provide page output of pages per minute for 5 color prints and 20 pages per minute for black and white prints. The printers can handle plain paper with formats up to A4 as reliably as thick paper of up to 209 gsm, labels, postcards and envelopes.

The magicolor 1650EN has been designed to be used easily and to be operated in a straightforward way. Via an LCD display and just a few self-explanatory buttons on the printer’s front side, the printer can be operated without any fuss. As soon as a cartridge needs replacing or the printer requires attention, users are informed of this right at their PC via PageScope Web Connection.

Via Konica Minolta’s Clean Planet Programme, used cartridges can be recycled to 99%. The Simitri HD toner requires lower fusing temperatures than conventional toners. As a consequence, users can save up to 15% of the energy required for printing. Furthermore, CO2, SO2 and NO2 emissions generated by Simitri HD toner are about 40% below conventional toner.