If you're planning on buying a home machine to allow you to take work home, you may want to trap your work on a floppy disk or send it to your desktop at work via a modem, but even then, a home printer will, sooner or later, prove to be a necessity, rather than a luxury.

The quality of inkjet printers has improved to such an extent that it might be tempting not to even contemplate looking at laserjet printers for use with a PC.

But for those not intending to use colour, a laser printer can be a more efficient workhorse at home or in the office.

Even the slowest laser printer is faster than an inkjet which you will appreciate if your workload calls for multiple copies on multiple projects.

People tend to look at the purchase price of a printer and assume that's their investment. But the cost of toner and paper add up, particularly if you're turning out a lot of printed work.

Average cost per printed page runs somewhere between two and three cents for a laser printer.

A number of inexpensive laser printers can be found on the Island. Bermuda is well supplied with inkjet suppliers too, so you may want to phone or shop around.

Most laser printers come with an on-board memory of 1MB, and almost all are expandable beyond that if you reach a stage of processing print-intensive projects.

More memory can usually be added to these laser printers, but you would probably be best advised to go with the standard memory and see, later, whether you need to upgrade. If you do, additional memory just slots in (more or less), so that decision can be deferred.

Besides, most modern printers acknowledge your CPU and system RAM are bigger and quicker, and allow your computer to do the thinking and staging of the documents faster.

Offloading documents to the PC can allow larger or more complicated images to be printed than the printer would otherwise be capable of.

In a recent consumer report, Computer Shopper magazine approved six low-priced laser printers: the Brother HL-730 Plus, HP Laserjet 6Lse, Lexmark Optra E , Minolta Page Works 6e, NEC Superscript 860, Okidata Okipage 6e and the Panasonic KX-P6500.

Any of these models will cost you less than $400 if you shop around. That's a US price; taxes and shipping to Bermuda will probably add close to half as much again.

In tests, the NEC printed seven pages a minute, the others between five and six, using a Word document.

It's worth remembering for a Laserjet at this price that speed wasn't the main attraction. Four pages a minute is adequate if you're only printing two pages.

It's eight copies of a 40-page report which can slow the process down (an hour will see such a job through on most of the models Computer Shopper looked at.) Your office printer will probably be faster and more expensive, but for those with home offices or the amateur writer who produces newsletters and the odd piece for a magazine, laser printing need not be expensive.

One well-known Bermuda writer with a local advertising agency has an HP4L (four pages a minute), which cost him $1,000 nearly four years ago. He reckons it turns out six-thousand pages a year for him, and has no plans to change it.

HARD COPY -- If you're planning on buying a machine for home use, you'll soon realise a printer is a necessity, not a luxury.

MINI SUPPLEMENT SUP