The annual Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is always crammed with the latest and greatest gadgets, such as compact data projectors, new Kindle competitors and 3D TV. So what is an ink jet printer doing getting an Innovations award in this hip forum?

That winner was the Lexmark Platinum Pro905 multifunctional. This $399 (street price) machine combines excellent design with some really great features. The most eye-popping is the cost of black-and-white pages. The model features black printing at a cost of around one cent per typical page. That’s a third less than most other ink jet printers, and half the cost of the lowest-cost laser printers in its category. In fact, you’d have to buy a $1,000+ laser printer to approach a one-cent cost per page.

The color pages are a good bargain as well, but not quite so jaw-dropping. At around 9.7 cents per typical page (by our calculation), it compares will with most ink jet printers on the market (12 -15 cents per color page) and with most lower-cost color laser printers (10-13 cents per page).

The key here is that for business printing and copying, the cost of black pages is critical. For all the buzz about color, the great majority of business printing is still in black-and-white. For anyone who prints over a 1,000 pages per month, the savings would quickly justify the Platinum Pro905’s higher sticker price.

The Platinum Pro905 has two other outstanding features. It offers a five-year warranty (nearly all office products offer one year). That warranty includes priority phone support and mail-in unit replacement for a broken machine. The second innovation is an interactive touch screen that allows you to use a growing variety of resident applications for streamlining ordinary tasks (such as printing directly from an iPhone or an interface with Stamps.com that gives you the functionality of a postage meter on your multifunctional). Such interfaces are common on copiers and high-end color laser printers, but it’s something new for the humble ink jet machine.

Tags: Consumer Electronics Show, Lexmark, Platinum Pro905