This is last in our series for choosing printers that fall within certain budget guide lines. In our previous post we talked about printers that fell in the $150, $300 and the $500 range. Now we are going to cover the $750 range which includes machines for the small to medium-size work groups, monochrome lasers that are fast and hold lots of paper, color lasers with good speed, multi-function models that handle heavier volume and most importantly, cheap toner.

For this price range our pick is the versatile Samsung CLP-775ND color Laser Printer. It breaks no new ground in output quality-photos are a challenge for it, as they are for most color lasers-but it’s fast and well equipped, and its toner is economical.

Standard features for this model includes automatic duplexing; a 500-sheet main input tray and a 100-sheet multipurpose tray for envelopes and other thicker media; and a 350-sheet output tray. As if that is not enough, you can also add up to two more bottom mounted , 500-sheet feeder trays. One concern is the transfer belt, which is a page wide plastic band that helps convey toner from the cartridge to the paper, it is fully exposed when you open the printer’s front panel, so you have to very careful not to drop something on it when exposed.

It has a 600MHz dual-core processor and 384MB of memory and you can expand it to 896MB. The CLP-775ND posted a fast time of 18.1 pages ppm when printing plain text. As we mentioned the quality of the color photos are nothing to write home about but they did come out quicker than average for this category of printers.

If you don’t need color take a look at the Oki B710dn monochrome laser printer, it’s a workhorse at $775, has a tremendous duty cycle of about 250,000 pages per month and paper capacity to match, 550 sheet main input tray and a 150 sheet multipurpose tray for thicker media and a second 550-sheet input tray is optional, output tray is a whooping 550 sheets.

Other models to consider:

Xerox‘s WorkCenter 6505DN @ $749 and the Brother MFC-9970CDW @ $700.