The number of gray shades that printers can reproduce is just one aspect in image quality. The ability to show details in darker areas of the image is another important factor, and here, the HPs excelled, with the less expensive LaserJet 1007 being the better of the two. The two Brother printers were again disappointing -- given their excellent text printing quality. The printouts showed little to no detail in the 'blacker' regions, but the image had excellent contrast. It looks as if these machines seemed to use more of the toner, which is also confirmed by our observation that prints from these had the least amount of grain. These printers will do well with line arts and graphs but anything with finer details (like a document with a scanned photograph) will suffer. You can solve this to some extent my manually adjusting the brightness and contrast setting in the printer driver by trial and error method.

Draft Quality: Draft or 'toner save' mode is a compromise between ink consumption and print quality. Obviously, lesser the toner consumed, greater the savings, while the printouts end up looking lighter. Using the toner save mode is a nifty way of eking out more prints from your toner for jobs that don't necessarily require the best quality. The two Canons were the meekest in toner saver mode producing considerably light prints. This also means that they are saving a lot of ink in the process. Canon claims a savings of up to 30 percent, which is significant. But we have to point out that the draft output from the LBP3108B leaves visible white spaces in print, with the result being, text looks dotted, making for difficult reading. The LBP2900B is better though. The difference is hardly noticeable with the Brother printers while with the HPs, it's minimal, with the P1007 being lighter (which again means it's likely to save you more ink).

The Need for Speed ?: Printing speed can be an important consideration in offices but is not as much in homes. A higher printing speed is desirable, but for the kind of applications these monochrome printers will see, it should not be a deal maker or breaker. We tested text printing speed at normal quality and settings and measured the time for the first print (usually longer owing to warm-up time) then measured the time per print (after the first page) by printing 20 pages and dividing the time taken by 20.

The HP Laserjet P1505 was the quickest printer, taking a mere 7 seconds to push out the first page out after hitting the Print button. Very impressive. HP puts this down to their Instant On technology, which, given the performance figures, we have to say works well. After the super-fast first print, the P1505 took a mere 2.6 seconds per page, closely followed by the Brother HL-2150N's 2.7 seconds per print (it took a longish 11 seconds for the first page, though). This works out to 23 ppm (page per minute) and 22 ppm, matching HP and Brother's claim for their printers.

The slowest printers, the Canon LBP 2900B and the HP Laserjet 1007, taking 4.8s and 4.4s respectively, are still acceptable for most print applications even in a small work group. A 25 page document will take only about 2 minutes.