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Step up to the department level, and you'll find a set of printers in the mid-$2,000-to-$4,000 range. With a rated engine speed of up to 20 ppm, these printers frequently include multiple paper trays, support for 11x17-inch paper and both PostScript and PCL languages.

The high-end of the market brings you to the 24 ppm, $4,000-to-$10,000 large departmental-class monochrome network printers. These are the dogsled teams of output devices: They deliver every paper size, offer multiple languages and often add niceties like queue management and lots of memory.

Finally, at the top of the heap are the 30-ppm or faster enterprise-class printers, which carry price tags of $10,000 to $100,000. Watch for a Network Computing Buyer's Guide to cover these next year.

The rated engine speed of a printer is often misleading. In the real world, printer speeds are generally slower as shown by click-to-clunk benchmark tests, which measure printer speed from the time you issue the print command in your application to the time the page is spit out of the printer. Check out the Buyer's Guide charts on page 188 for more on printer speeds.

The most significant developments we've seen this past year center on connectivity and network administration via the addition of HTTP-based utilities. Nearly every printer on the market supports both the critical TCP/IP and IPX/SPX protocols, virtually assuring connectivity within complex heterogeneous networks. NOS and driver support span the spectrum of Microsoft Windows versions and often include support for MacOS and Unix; NetWare's bindery mode is supported by just about every printer, and NDS (Novell Directory Services) support is finally starting to make a strong showing. Most printers also provide support for EtherTalk, allowing Macintoshes to connect.

Remote Presence Perhaps the biggest plus in the printer market is the growing presence of tools to manage consumables--toner, developer and fusers--from remote workstations. With these management tools, you no longer have to fear an angry horde of users complaining about printer problems.

Couple all of this with beefed-up HTTP-based administration, and you can maintain a virtual hawk's-eye view on your printers while lolling on a chaise lounge in Tahiti. Whether you call it Web-, HTTP- or intranet-based, it boils down to the ability to manage virtually every printer feature from any Web browser at any time.

At the simplest level, printer manufacturers embed a Web-server in the printer. The net effect is much like telnet-based utilities. Administrators browse to each printer's IP address to manage it. This is great if you're dealing with a limited number of printers; you can even code a Web page with links to each printer you manage.

But once you get into enterprise-class management, this approach quickly becomes limited. The solution offered by Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Web JetAdmin is to create a server-side CGI (Common Gateway Interface)-based application capable of simultaneously hand ling multiple HP printers from any browser. This is an acceptable solution where applicable, but it does have its problems--such as the need to dedicate server resources and the solution only applies to HP printers.

To download an Adobe Acrobat .pdf format version of the Monochrome Network Printers Buyer's Guide charts, click here.