Eight Color Printers Ease The Management Burden By David A. Harvey   A trip to the printer doesn't have to be that bad: You can stretch your legs and catch up on the latest office gossip while waiting for your output. Although the printer may have replaced the watercooler and copier as the de facto office gathering spot, it's probably the last place a busy system administrator wants to be. Because businesses may have as many as 100 printers onsite, remote administration, troubleshooting and setup of those printers are of paramount importance to network managers as they try to deal with a dizzying array of printer technologies, network protocols and software. Add color to the mix, an d you have a host of new factors to manage: a slew of consumables including four or five toner/developer cartridges, fuser oil and more; increasingly complicated drivers; and management parameters that will burden both IS and helpdesk personnel. To view the Report card. We tested eight laser-class departmental network color printers to determine what they offer to ease the network administrator's burden and what they provide for users' print demands. We required printers to be at least laser-quality--600 dpi or better. And they had to network: At minimum, we mandated that the printers had to come ready to connect to Ethernet networks over TCP/IP, IPX/SPX and AppleTalk protocols while providing management tools that run in a mix of Windows, Macintosh and Unix environments. Overall, the best networking feature we saw was Tektronix's and Hew lett-Packard Co.'s HTTP-based administration. By letting you connect to the printer via any TCP/IP network, from anywhere, Web administration allows you to control your printer from any workstation--without having to install client software. Another important feature--real printer queue man agement--also was surprisingly hard to find. Most of these printers stop short at letting you view and manipulate jobs that are in the printer's internal queue. Only the IBM Corp.'s Network Color Printer serves up a true queue management scheme: It consists of four internal printer queues that let jobs be printed immediately, printed in queue order or stored indefinitely. When you add up all the factors that determine a truly excellent network color printer--performance, quality and network administration--the clear winner is Tektronix's Phaser 550. Web-based management, combined with exceptional print quality, good paper handling and a fine cast of supporting options send the Phaser 550 to the head of the class. T he Phaser is only set to stun the competition, however; the front of the pack was grouped closely with the HP's Color LaserJet 5M, IBM's Network Color Printer and QMS' magicolor CX/40 within a nose of the Phaser. Tektronix Phaser 550 Tektronix's Phaser 550 combines the best remote administration tools with the cleanest and most accurate color output. Thanks largely to its 1,200-dpi engine, this was the only printer to deliver near-photographic color on our 300-dpi scanned image test. It was also the only printer to match the colors on the CorelDraw test image properly. Superb quality coupled with strong networking makes the Phaser 550 a good choice for almost any department. The unit we tested came equipped with a PhaserShare Ethernet card that sported 10BASE-T and 10BASE-2 connectors alongside high-speed parallel and SCSI interfaces. Token-Ring and LocalTalk/serial cards are also a vailable. Once we connected to our 10BASE-T network, the first task was to get the printer's IP address set. It should always be this difficult to set parameters: Fire up your favorite browser, HTTP over to the IP address and set the IP, subnet mask, gateway and broadcast addresses to conform to your network. Once you reset th e printer, HTTP to the new IP address and continue tuning your printer settings. To download an Adobe Acrobat .pdf format version of the Network Color Printers features chart, click here. To download an Adobe Acrobat .pdf format version of the Network Color Printers "How We Tested" diagrams, click here.

Updated April 24, 1997