Tally T8004 review

If colour is vital for you, but you still need to print reasonable runs of the same document, a colour laser printer may well fit the bill.

Tally has recently launched a new colour laser at an RRP of £1,195, but with a street price (they reckon) of nearer a grand. The T8004 contains four toner cartridges, just like the four inks of an inkjet, plus a rather large transfer belt for moving the toner to the imaging system itself. All of this has to be installed, together with a bottle of oil. Otherwise, it looks pretty much like an ordinary (if somewhat large) laser printer, in the HP mould. The fun starts when you go to print with this clever beast.

As your document's processed, it's separated into its four process colours - cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Each of these is transferred to the imaging drum separately, and laid onto the paper. The toner is then 'cooked' onto the paper, which results in a neat, semi-gloss colour image.

Intermediate colours are produced in the same way as in an inkjet - little dots of the primaries are inter-speckled. But there's one big difference between the T8004 and an inkjet - the T8004 can throw out four copies of a full-colour page per minute (it'll do 8ppm in mono!), regardless of the coverage. An ink-squirter would be hard pushed to produce a 600dpi A4-size colour photo in anything under five minutes.

With photos, though, the T8004 fails to match the quality of the very best in the ink-squirting brigade. (Tally tells us the printer is aimed more at the 'business graphics' side of the market, anyway.) Now, that's not to say that the output is bad, as such. It isn't. It's actually very good - better than the £20,000 colour lasers of six years ago, and an order of magnitude better than you get in your daily tabloid. On plain paper, it'll beat a 300 or 600dpi inkjet every day of the week.

Which takes us to the other big plus: with no need for expensive paper, and toner costs roughly half those of inkjet cartridges, it's also very cheap to run. Check out the table below for details. (Does anyone have an inkjet they really believe will last for 50,000 pages? Did you realise just how much it would cost if you did?)

It pays to fine-tune the driver to get the colour balance just right. Given another week with the machine, we reckon we could get it to turn out rather spiffing results. It's not, then, a trivial purchase - but, included in the price, Tally will send an engineer to you to do the installation!

The Tally T8004 is fast, especially for multiple copies. Photo quality is good (if not quite as good as the best of the inkjets), and it easily matches or beats the rest on business graphics. And it's an absolute flyer at mono text.

Best of all, it's a twentieth of the price of colour lasers of a mere few years ago!