Even at the low end of the price scale, color lasers tend to be too big to serve as personal printers—unless you stretch the definition of what counts as personal. You might be able to justify having the printer to yourself, but finding room for it on your desk is another matter altogether. The HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni Printer ($399.99 direct) stands out for being small enough to qualify as truly personal. Even better, it prints great-looking output, with text and graphics that put most personal ink jet printers to shame and photos that fall just short of true photo quality. Unfortunately, its somewhat slow speed and low paper capacity hold me back from giving it a higher recommendation.

Measuring just 10.0 by 15.7 by 17.8 inches (HWD), the CP1518ni takes up less space than many inkjets, and it's short enough so you won't feel as if it's towering over you. The small size also goes hand in hand with a relatively light weight for a color laser of 40 pounds.

Unfortunately, one of the ways HP kept the height down was by designing the printer with a shallow paper drawer. Its 150-sheet capacity should be enough for most personal use, or even for sharing the printer in a small office, but I'd be happier with a 250-sheet tray, or at least the option of adding a second tray. If you print more than about 30 pages per day on average, you may find the paper running out often enough to be annoying.

Setting up the CP1518ni on a network is standard fare. Remove the packing materials, load paper, plug in the network cable, and run the automated setup routine from disc. I ran my tests using Windows XP, but according to HP, the printer also comes with drivers for Vista, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, and Mac OS 10.2.8 and later.

Speed is not one of the CP1518ni's more attractive features. The engine rating is just 12 pages per minute for monochrome and 8 ppm for color. On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com) that translated to a relatively slow total of 21 minutes 41 seconds. That's roughly twice the time—and half the speed—of the similarly priced Brother HL-4040CN, at 10:27, or the somewhat-more-expensive Editors' Choice Xerox Phaser 6180N, at 10:22.

Worse, the CP1518ni is slower than some inkjets. HP's own HP Officejet Pro L7680 All-In-One, for example, took just 15:35 on the laser version of our tests. That said, the speed is within a tolerable range for a personal printer meant for light duty. Keep in mind that the L7680 is unusually fast for an inkjet, and the CP1518ni is still faster than the vast majority of inkjets. It also does comparatively better for printing photos than business applications, averaging just 32 seconds for 4-by-6s and 35 seconds for 8-by-10s on our tests.

The slow speed is also offset by high-quality output. Text quality is just short of the best available. More than half the fonts in our tests qualified as well formed and highly readable at 5 points, and most of those qualified at 4 points. Only one highly stylized font with thick strokes needed more than 8 points to pass both thresholds. The printer should be able to handle any text you need to print.

Graphics are nearly as impressive as text. I saw some minor dithering in the form of subtle patterns, but no real problems to take away from the crisp edges and vibrant color. I wouldn't hesitate to use the printer for graphics going to an important client or for marketing materials such as trifold brochures, mailings, and handouts.

The printer also earns points for its photo output, which is at the high end of the quality range for a laser. Photos fall just short of true photo quality, largely because of the same dithering I noticed in graphics. Yet, here again, they're more than good enough for things like marketing materials and putting up on bulletin boards in the office or a refrigerator door at home. They're also good enough for some kinds of business use—the obvious example being a real estate office that needs to print photos of houses to give to potential buyers.

Complementing the unusually high-quality photo output for a laser, the CP1518ni also prints directly from PictBridge cameras and memory cards. There's no LCD for previewing photos, but you can print an index sheet, and then pick the photos to print from the sheet. Here again, this could be handy in a real estate office or other business that needs to print photos.

The CP1518ni is a good laser printer that would score higher if it were faster and offered a larger paper capacity. What's more, I'd be more apt to forgive even these limitations if it were a lot cheaper, or at least offered a lower cost per page. (The claimed cost is 3.2 cents for monochrome pages and 16.9 cents for color pages.) Overall, however, the small size and superior output make it an attractive choice if you need a truly personal-size printer but can't afford to skimp on output quality.

Check out the HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni Printer's performance test results.

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