If you want a good color printer that will last for thousands of pages for your home or home office, a laser would be a good choice. The toner lasts much longer than the ink in an ink cartridge on a inkjet printer, because it has a bigger volume and much less toner is used per page (even in color at high quality) than ink in a traditional printer.

As an added benefit, toner refill is easier and cheaper (except for a few printers that have counter chips installed). If you don’t need to print photos but still need to print documents, charts and other things in color and in high volume (school projects, research, papers where color is a necessity, etc.), then laser color printers are definitely a good way to go.

Without further ado, here is a list of the top color laser printers, which are cheap and have a high enough quality to print anything you need.

1. Xerox Phaser 6110B Color Laser Printer

The Xerox Phaser 6110B is the cheapest on this list, but it is certainly not worse than the others. It’s only drawback is the slow printing speed, which is only 17 pages per minute black and white or 4 ppm color, but if you can overlook that and the lack of a duplex, the other specifications are very nice: a 2400×600 resolution, networking features to connect it via LAN in a home office and watermarking. With a monthly duty cycle of 24,200 pages per month, it is certainly not the best choice for a busy office, but should be more than enough for your home or home office.

2. Samsung CLP-600N Color Laser Printer

Next up is Samsung’s CLP-600N workhorse, which is ideal for any home and home office environment and can work relatively well even in a busy office. It prints 20 pages per minute in both black and white and color at a nice resolution of 2400×600. With a duty cycle of 45,000 it’s close to rivaling the more expensive competitors, but it comes short with it’s manual duplex (which is still better than no duplex).

3. Konica Minolta Magicolor 5440 DL Color Laser Printer

At this machine’s price, you will hardly find anything better. It’s got a 2400 resolution with automatic color correction, a network adapter, a 27 pages per minute printing speed and an automatic duplex. Oh, it can also print 12,000 pages on one set of cartridges and has a duty cycle of 60,000 pages per month. If you can shed out a little bit more or aren’t against the idea of purchasing a used unit, this one would be a perfect color laser printer.

4. Lexmark C532DN Color Laser Printer

Lexmark C532DN is positioned as a fast and quality laser printer, albeit at a higher price than its direct competitors (take the above Konica Minolta, for example). Aside from that it is a fine printer: 24 pages per minute, 2400×600 dpi resolution, integrated duplex and networking adapter and a duty cycle of 75,000 pages per month. It also has a special mode for reduced power consumption.

5. Brother HL-4070CDW Color Laser Printer

A fairly fast printer at 21 ppm, Brother HL-4070CDW comes in short only in the duty cycle section, which is 35,000 pages per month. Aside from that, the price is right, the duplex is automatic, the networking adapter also has a partner in the form of a USB 2.0 port and the resolution is your standard nice 2400 dpi.

6. Brother HL-4040CN Color Laser Printer

HL-4070’s smaller Brother (pun intended :-), the HL-4040 is an ideal choice if you don’t need the duplex unit and are ok with a paper capacity of 300. The other features are exactly like the 4070’s, plus a special high-capacity toner cartridge is available for this model, which will give you more printing and more money in your pocket (or bank account).

As a conclusion, I will say that you can try and buy the above printers from big corporations as used, but in good condition (which is much cheaper), buy new toner and they will last a lifetime.