The Officejet H470wbt printer has most of the necessary ports, like PictBridge USB, standard USB, and a SD/miniSD/MMC slot, but lacks the older model’s Compact Flash port. The H470wbt uses two cheap ink cartridges, one for black ink and another tri-color cartridge. HP offers one compatible black inkjet cartridge that will reportedly produce 500 prints for $19.99, averaging 3.9 cents per page. The color cartridge comes in regular (330 prints) and high capacity (600 prints) for $24.99 and $34.99, averaging 7.5 cents or 5.8 cents per page, respectively. These costs are well within the average price and yield for desktop inkjet printers. Still, we wish that HP had an ink-saving feature like the Canon Pixma iP90v that gives you three options for printing either straight black, save black mode, or composite black.

Within the driver settings, HP offers a feature called RLT, {Real Life Technologies} that supposedly helps printed images look more like real life. We found this option to be useful in portraits, but the general quality of our images were poorly rendered, even with HP’s Premium Plus paper and high-quality ink sets.

The entire front panel of HL-4040CN’s printer contains four cheap toner cartridges, lined up in a horizontal row. The four cartridges include three colors and one black cartridge. Black cartridge is good for about 2,500 prints and each of the three color cartridges will last for about 1,500 prints. Brother also offers high-capacity versions cartridges at a very cheap price: the black one print about 5,000 pages ($93) and the color ones print about 4,000 pages in just $130 each. Using the high-capacity cheap cartridges, per-page costs work out to about 1.9 cents for a black-only page and 11.7 cents for a full-color page–inexpensive for black prints and about average for color prints. The recommended monthly duty cycle (that is, the suggested monthly print volume) is 35,000 pages, making it better suited for busy workgroups or small offices than for home users. The printer’s driver also has a Toner Save mode, which helps reduce your print costs by using less toner; obviously, the print quality will take a hit.

Brother HL-4040CN cheap cartridge is the fastest with color text and graphics. The HL-4040CN gave a more consistently good performance with print quality. Black text obtained from the cartridge is dark, sharp, and clean. The mono graphics print showed excellent handling of the grayscale, smooth blocks of black color, and excellent handling of photo elements.

Although multifunction laser printers are generally office-oriented, the HP Color LaserJet CM1017 MFP lacks fax functionality, which may be a deal breaker for some offices. On the other hand, it does provide a feature that’s relatively uncommon among laser printers: media card readers for printing photographs. You can print decent-quality photos on plain paper or on HP’s laser photo paper, a feature that can be useful in certain industries such as real estate or insurance.

The HP CM1017 comes with a 300MHz processor and 94MB of RAM standard (upgradeable to 224MB). It sports an Ethernet port for networking, or you can attach it directly to a PC via USB 2.0. Duplex, or two-sided, printing is a manual operation, as the HP CM1017 lacks a built-in duplexer.

As we mentioned before, the ability to print straight from a memory card is an uncommon feature on laser printers. With the HP CM1017, not only do you get the ability to print photos, but you get a decent range of features to boot. You can preview the contents of your card on the color LCD via a slide show or by manually clicking through the range of images. When it comes time to print, you can choose among a range of print sizes, paper sizes, and paper types, including HP’s laser photo paper. You can even choose to print a range of photos (by photo number, not date). And best of all, you can print an index sheet of all the images on your card or a proof sheet. The index sheet includes the photo number, the file name, and the date it was taken– all great references. The proof sheet lets you bubble in the images you want printed, select your paper type (plain or glossy), and a select a layout (from one image per page up to six images per page). Then you simply scan the proof sheet, and the printer takes care of printing the images for you. These aren’t photos you’ll necessarily want to frame and hang, but the ability to print good-quality photos on a laser printer is a very useful tool for some offices.

The HP CM1017 uses HP Q6000A black laser toner cartridge for about $75 and uses HP Q6001A, Q6002A and Q6003A color laser toner cartridge which cost about $89 each.