The printer wars are upon us, and Helwett-Packard Co has upped the ante with its first colour laser printer, the HP Color Laserjet, which lists for $7,300 and is expected to hit the streets in the US at as little as $6,000, a price the company reckons puts it 17% below competitors QMS Inc and Xerox Corp, although the box does 300 by 300 dots per inch against 600 by 600 for QMS. 1,200 by 1,200 for Xerox: the HP Color LaserJet uses an electrophotographic laser process with four tonor colours – cyan, yellow, magenta and black, with colour-palette cacheing of commonly used colours for fast printing; it is networkable and prints at up to two pages per minute at full colour and 10 pages per minute using one colour; it is available now in North America but the rest of the world has to wait until February.
