The young 'uns come running to sit on our lap by the fire and hear our stories -- well, actually they say they'd rather run into the fire than hear our stories, but we remember, anyway, about the first HP LaserJet printer back in '84. A whopper, it was, easily half as big as your desk, and it cost three thousand buckaroos. But it started a trend that couldn't be stopped; businesses have relied on high-speed, high-quality lasers to crank out their black-and-white text pages ever since.

But while monochrome lasers (much faster and sharper than that first LaserJet) have shrunk to the size of a box of Tide and to prices starting under $200, and color inkjet printers have bloomed in billions of offices and homes, very few are enjoying the speed and sharpness of a laser for their color print jobs. That's because color lasers' cost -- usually $2,000 or more -- and bulk -- usually closer to a refrigerator than a desk accessory -- have made them niche products shared by lucky workgroups in networked offices.

Well, HP is finally helping to change that. While Minolta-QMS has carried the low-cost color laser banner for a few years, it's unlikely to match the splash that's sure to come from the printer giant's new entry: a color laser that's both compact and cheap enough for a small office or even a busy home office.

Both "compact" and "cheap" need a little qualifying: The Color LaserJet 2500 is about the size of a small TV set, 15 inches tall with a 19 by 18-inch footprint, and movable by one person (53 pounds). So it'll technically fit on your desktop, but is frankly still a bit bulky (and, compared to today's whisper-quiet inkjets, a bit noisy) to have right next to you rather than on a separate table or printer stand.

And while the 2500L model has the eye-catching price of $999 complete with USB and parallel ports and 64MB (expandable to 256MB) of memory, its only paper tray is an inkjet-style, fold-down 125-sheet flap that strikes us as comically skimpy for feeding a laser printer. You'll really want either the $1,199 Color LaserJet 2500, which has a 250-sheet bottom drawer in addition to the fold-down tray, or $1,499 model 2500n, which adds an Ethernet print server for office sharing. (Heavy-duty offices can check out the 2500tn, which adds a third, 500-sheet tray for up to 875 pages between refills; it's $1,899).

Those cautions aside, the 2500 is cute and capable enough to make even someone with modest, inkjet-class color printing needs muse, "I gotta get me one of these": It's reasonably fast, admirably sharp even using cheap copier paper (no need for costly coated inkjet stock), and built to last, with a monthly duty cycle of up to 30,000 pages.