workgroup printer is a high-speed printer designed for heavy use in a small to medium-size office environment. These printers typically have large paper trays, heavy-duty mechanical parts, and built-in network interfaces. Workgroup printers are great if you frequently print large jobs, or if you find that people in your office are frequently queuing up behind the printer.
Workgroup printers are significantly more expensive than those $200 inkjet and $400 laser printers that have been flooding the market. But they are frequently cheaper than buying three printers.
I looked at two printers from Hewlett Packard: the 2000Cse color inkjet and the LaserJet 2100TN.
If you are going to buy a color printer and you have the money, I heartily recommend HP's 2000Cse. This printer has 600-by-600 black-and-white resolution, 1,200-by-1,200 color resolution, and prints really fast for an inkjet - roughly 20 seconds per page in my tests. (HP quotes 6 seconds per page: I guess their pages have more white space than mine do.)
The printer comes in two versions: the HP2000Cse ($799), and the HP2000CN ($945), which includes a built-in ethernet interface. You can also get a second paper tray for $199. The printer can handle envelopes one at a time or in a whole stack. Unfortunately, there is no way to insert an oversize 9-by-12 envelope, since the printer's paper path is limited to 8 1/2-by-11-inch paper.
While other reviewers have complained about the 2000C's print quality on standard paper, it looked just fine to me. The one exception came when printing on transparencies; I got occasional black smears and drops from one transparency to the next. Fortunately, ink comes in big high-capacity cartridges, which HP says lowers the cost of printing to 3.5 cents per page for black-and-white text, 12 cents per page for full-color.
One thing that's often ignored when considering a new printer is the quality of the printer's drivers. A driver is the program inside your computer that controls the printer. Without a driver, the printer is just a hunk of metal and plastic. A good driver can make a good printer terrific.
The HP2000C comes with a driver called the ''Printer Toolbox.'' This program lets you monitor the printer's ink levels, troubleshoot, align print heads, calibrate the color, and access a fairly well-written set of help pages.
The printer driver further allows you to select ''Ordered Printing,'' which causes the printed pages to come out in reverse order, so that the printer stacks them in the correct order.
HP's black-and-white LaserJet 2100 is a fairly zippy printer, delivering 10 pages per minute for normal office work. Where this printer stands out is its resolution: 1,200-by-1,200 dots per inch. Photographs printed on this printer look like photo s rather than like a copy of something that was printed in the newspaper. It comes with a 250-sheet paper tray that has an indicator on the outside showing how much paper is left.
HP's driver can automatically pull the first page of a print job from one printer and the second page from another. A third fold-down paper tray holds envelopes, checks, and other special items.
The basic 2100xi ($650) comes with parallel and infrared interfaces. For $750 you can move up to the 2100M, which includes a Macintosh serial interface and a built-in PostScript engine. For $950 you can get the 2100TN, which adds an ethernet interface.
Unfortunately, while HP sent me the 2100TN to review, I was never able to get the ethernet interface to work. Instead, I just hooked the printer onto a spare computer's parallel port and shared the printer over the network.
I tried printing to the 2100TN using both the HP PCL (Printer Control Language) and the PostScript. I couldn't see any difference on the printouts, confirming a statement I made last year in this column that Windows users have no real need for PostScript printers.
Like most of its other modern laserjets, the 2100 series has an infrared port on the front, allowing you to print from a laptop or Windows CE palmtop computer. Although this is an interesting feature, I don't know a single person who uses the infrared printing ability on a regular basis.
All in all, I really like these two printers. But if I had to choose between them, I would probably go with the 2000C. Although it prints black and white at half the speed, it also prints color, and it isn't that expensive to operate.
Linux followup
Last week I asked readers to drop me an e-mail about whether they'd like to have Microsoft's Office applications running on their beloved Linux operating system.
The response was far from overwhelming: I got e-mails from roughly 25 people, nearly 90 percent of whom said that the only reason they still run Windows was to run Office. When they are not using a word processor, they boot their computer into Linux to take advantage of that operating system's speed, agility, and reliability.
So perhaps Microsoft is better off not coming out with an Office for Linux. After all, if Office ran on Linux, there would be one less reason to buy Microsoft's operating systems.
Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at plugged-in@simson.net "> plugged-in@simson.net .
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