Dell's 5230dn monochrome laser printer may cost more up front, but its speed and expandability make it an excellent choice for a medium-size workgroup. And with its three-year limited warranty with next-business-day on-site service (not to mention its affordable toner) it's a great buy in the long term.

The 5230dn offers plenty of standard features, plus room to grow. It supports a combined 350 pages of input from the main and multipurpose trays. You can add up to three 550-sheet drawers ($250 each) and a 2000-sheet drawer feeder ($900) for a maximum capacity of 4000 sheets.

Equipped with USB and ethernet ports, the 5230dn also has a slot for optional serial or parallel connectors ($90 or less). An empty bay lets you add a hard drive for fonts or forms. The control panel has a 3-inch, four-line, backlit monochrome LCD that can tilt upward slightly, plus clearly labeled buttons, a keypad, and a front USB port.

Built for high-volume printing, the 5230dn has a 200,000-page monthly duty cycle and very good speed. It averaged 21.5 pages per minute on a Mac and 23.4 ppm on a PC when printing mostly plain text with some simple monochrome graphics. Though the text quality was as good as you'd expect, images suffered from a limited grayscale range and slower print times.

A high-volume office needs affordable toner, and the 5230dn delivers that. Replacement use-and-return cartridges come in $140, 7000-page standard and $300, 21,000-page high-yield sizes, working out to 2 cents and 1.4 cents per page, respectively. Nonreturnable cartridges are available at a significantly higher cost. The printer even ships with a standard cartridge rather than a lower-capacity "starter" unit. Cartridges are easy to remove and replace; the cartridge itself displays clear illustrations, just in case.

Macworld's buying advice

A busy office needs a printer that can keep pace. The Dell 5230dn can do that and it can grow with your business. The inexpensive toner and generous warranty sweeten the deal.