One of the most amazing areas of your local computer superstore is the aisle where they sell color printers for personal computers.

The bargains available on new printers right now are almost unbelievable at least for those of us who have been watching the printer market for a few years. For well under $200, you can get a color printer offering output quality that would have cost four times as much about five years ago. If you’re willing to pay an additional $200 or so, you can get a small desktop printer that turns out pictures, text and graphics almost equal to what professional print shops can do.

The basic rating system for PC color printers is “dots per inch that is, how many dots of ink there are per inch of the printed page. Eons ago (that is, about 1992) when printer makers first brought out inexpensive color printers that could produce 300 dots per inch, we pronounced the results “gorgeous” and urged everybody to buy a 300-dpi printer. They cost about $800 at the time.

Today, 300 dpi is the entry-level printer, the one that many retailers throw in for free when you buy a home computer. Nowadays, 600-dpi printers are available for less than $300. And recently, the makers have increased the ante to produce new models that exceed the 600-dpi quality level.

We’ve recently been test-driving a couple of these new high-quality color printers, both available for about $400.

The Lexmark 7000 is a small, light, quiet printer that turns out color copy at a density of 1,200 dpi. You can definitely see the difference that 1,200 dpi makes particularly when you print posters, photos, multicolored graphs, or fancy type. Even for plain text, though, the Lexmark 7000 at its highest quality setting produces a page that is sharper and more professional in appearance than lesser printers.

This new Lexmark model gives you a choice of three speeds. The “fast draft” setting spun out our test page (combining color graphics and plain black text) in about 24 seconds, but produced drab output acceptable only for proofreading at home. “Normal” speed turned out our test page in 45 seconds, and it looked good. The “high quality” setting, the one that goes to 1,200 dpi, took 90 seconds, and the results are beautiful.

The Lexmark doesn’t make much noise, and it is reasonably parsimonious about ink consumption, unless you do all your printing at the high quality setting. The Lexmark software has a nice “gas gauge” feature that always shows you how much ink is left in the black and color ink cartridges.

The engineers at Epson set out to produce a new model to outdo the Lexmark 7000. The result is the Epson Stylus Color 800 printer, which can print at 1,440 dpi at its best setting, and is thus for the time being, anyway the quality champion in the $400 price range. You can see that in the pages it turns out.

The Epson doesn’t have the “fast draft” setting that Lexmark offers; you choose between “speed” or “quality.” Both settings produce beautiful text and color the best we’ve ever seen from a printer in this price range.

If you print a photograph on glossy photo paper using the Epson’s quality setting, it takes about 5 minutes for the picture to come out, but the result is as good as the local photo shop produces. For our text-and-graphics test page, speeds were equivalent to the Lexmark results.

This new Epson printer is bigger and heavier than the Lexmark model, and considerably noisier. When you start it up, it erupts into a startling outburst of clicks, whirrs, beeps, and buzzes; one of our kids said it sounded like R2D2 having a nervous breakdown. This goes on for almost two minutes, and is rather comical if you’re not in a hurry.

Unlike the Lexmark, the Epson Stylus Color 800 comes with connections for both Macintosh and Windows PCs; we kept both computers hooked up to the printer at once, with no problem. The Epson software now offers the same “gas gauge” feature as Lexmark, but its error messages are less clear. It’s easier to print envelopes and postcards on the Epson, because the paper feed is simpler.

These two models are the leading edge of a new wave of high-quality, low-cost PC printers. You ought to take the plunge.

T.R. Reid is Rocky Mountain bureau chief of the Washington Post. Brit Hume is managing editor of Fox News in Washington. You can reach them in care of the Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St., Washington D.C. 20071-9200, or you can e-mail T.R. Reid at [email protected], or Brit Hume at [email protected].