For color printing to be useful, it has to be cheap, fast and high quality. Inkjet technologies provide high quality and low up-front hard prices, but are not speedy -- at least from a business user perspective -- and the cost per page has been terminally high.

Color laser printing provides better speed, but the hardware is expensive and the cost per page is still not cheap.

Tektronix, now owned by Xerox, aims to shatter all those concerns. The company's Phaser 850 wax-based, solid-ink printer is lightning fast. It provides remarkable color quality and costs about as much as a laser printer to run.

Sadly, the up-front purchase cost of the hardware ($2,500-$4,300 US, $3,500-$6,100 Canadian) could severely impair your inclination to put color in the office.

Put that aside, and Tektronix is doing all the right things to put easy-to-maintain color printing in the office.

First impression of the Phaser 850 is blow-your-mind remarkable. The pages that come out of this printer look like magazine covers. They have a glossy sheen, high 1200 dpi (dot-per-inch) resolution reproduction (on the DP and DX models, 800 dpi on the 850N).

They are fueled by solid blocks of ink, four distinctly-shaped wax blocks that come in cyan, magenta, yellow or black, the CMYK model of color printing.

Each block drops into a slot that matches the block's unique shape -- so there is no risk of putting the wrong color in the wrong slot. No more toner. No more fuss.

Your office staff will love this technology. Not only because it is easy to maintain, but because anyone in the office can learn how to add ink. The blocks are non toxic. You can lick them with no ill effects.

It gets even better: black ink is free for the life of the printer. Each color comes with an extra black and Tektronix will ship you more black wax ink all for the asking.

The printer comes in three versions (the 850DX was tested for this review) offering 32 megabytes, 64 megabytes or 128 megabytes of printer memory. The 850DX comes with a 6-gigabyte hard drive.

All models are network capable or run off a Parallel port via a Universal Serial Bus connection. The DP and DX models offer quick, two-sided printing. The DX also offers a standard 500-sheet paper tray. The tray is optional on the other two models.

Each sheet of paper feeds through, is printed and is then pushed out to the exit tray. It gets sucked back in for second-side printing.

Tektronix claims print speeds of 14 pages per minute in draft mode. That drops to eight pages per minute in standard mode. Transparencies print in six and 3.5 pages per minute. Actual speeds are very close to these specifications.

The bottleneck in print speeds lies in the Phaser 850's warm-up phase. When not used for a while, the printer goes to sleep. When revived, it takes one to four minutes to start printing. In a low-volume printing environment, this could be annoying.

There are other issues. The manual page feeder often misfeeds and takes a keen, steady hand to operate. The output mechanism spits out sheets in such a way that the printer output bin sensor thinks the bin is full and reports an error.

The device also comes with resources management software that monitors usage of consumable supplies. This is finicky to install and non-intuitive.

You'll notice all these things only after you pick yourself off the floor, however, which is where you landed when you saw what came out of the printer.

If you want one color printer in your office for quality output and ease of use, the Tektronix Phaser 850 is by far the best color printer this reviewer has seen to date.

Its price may be frightening and its quirks are sometimes annoying but you'll be hard pressed to find better color technology on the market.