Long Beach (CA) – Inkjet printers have come increasingly under pressure by cheap laser printers, but Epson today announced a fast inkjet that should appeal to buyers looking for a printer under $100.

If you are looking for a workhorse printer in your office or at home and it has to be a inkjet printer, then this could be an interesting model for you. Epson’s new C120 printer can churn out up to 25 pages per minute (ppm) in black and white and up to 11 ppm in color in a default setting. If that is not enough, the printer offers a draft mode, which accelerates the print speed up to 37 ppm in black and white and 20 ppm in color.

Epson claims that this performance puts the C120 in the lead among ink jet printers under $160 in terms of black and white printing, while offering about twice the speed of printers in the sub-$100 segment. The C120 is available now for a suggested retail price of $90.

According to Epson, the C120 is aiming for customers "who want to make the best impression when printing mainly on plain paper but don’t want the expense of a color laser printer or the limitations of a monochrome laser printer." The purchase price in fact looks attractive, even in a time when black-and-white laser printers are selling for less than $100 (for example through Dell) and color laser printers are hitting the $250 mark.

However, the C120 can get expensive, if you are planning to print more than just an occasional letter here and there : Black ink cartridges for the C120 with a yield of "up to" 245 pages are currently selling for about $20, while a color cartridge (cyan/magenta/yellow) is rated at a yield of "up to" 350 pages for about $38.

Count on spending at least $200 on ink for every 1000 pages you print – which is about in line with the cost that is to be expected when using an economical color laser printer.