Hewlett-Packard shareholders opposing the company's planned merger with Compaq point to the latter's PC business as an unprofitable, low-priced commodity market, the antithesis of HP's legendary success selling premium printers and high-profit-margin supplies. Trouble is, the printer market is getting pretty cutthroat, too. Why else would Hewlett-Packard introduce a $249 LaserJet positioned below its previous entry-level $400 model?
The LaserJet 1000 is HP's response to popular, under-$300 laser printers from Brother, Lexmark, and Samsung -- like them, a monochrome laser that's cheap and compact enough to share a desk with a color ink-jet, letting users switch between the laser's fast, sharp text for word processing jobs and the ink-jet's slower but colorful charts and digital images. (Today's USB ports make linking two printers to one PC much easier than yesterday's manual switch boxes.)
We decided to compare the 1000 with another $249 personal laser -- the Samsung ML-1250, which is actually a step-up sibling of the $199 model ML-1210 we reviewed last June. Going by advertised specs, the Samsung wins -- it's rated at 12 pages per minute with 1,200 by 600-dpi resolution versus the HP's 10 ppm and 600 by 600 dpi, and has both parallel and USB ports to the LaserJet's USB only. But does the HP have other advantages besides a sterling brand and reputation for quality?
