best laserjet printer?

I don't think any laser works well with photos. Desktop B&W photos work best printed on an inkjet with all the colors (and yes, you can get very neutral tones). Are you talking about line-art? What resolution do you need for the images? Maybe I'm thinking of printers with higher quality than you need.

Oh, and budget? how about 600 bucks, give or take. I paid about that for my network- and postscript- enabled color laserjet 2550N. Maxing out the memory (3rd party RAM cost about 10% of what HP wanted) made all the difference in printing images.

To get 11x17 and duplexer for $600 you are going to have to go with a used printer - try checking ebay for the Laserjet 5 Si. The photo output will be marginal - large areas of black will not saturate very well..

I don't know if there's a wifi adapter for it yet, but I love the HP 2100 I use at work. They seem pretty adaptable and the output is great.

I recently picked up a Brother HL-2070N for real cheap (200 CAD). It is an amazing printer. Network support, USB2, 1200dpi. My macbook picks it up without any additional drivers. It will start blinking red once in a while if i leave it on while attached via USB, and the host computer goes to sleep. Doing a power cycle fixes it usually, but I just moved it off onto my lan and it hasn't happened since.

I bought an HP Laserjet 5 on ebay for £50. It does everything you say, and I've never noticed it being slow. Our picture desk use one at the office for the hundreds of pictures they print a day, and have never noticed a problem.

agreeing with lekvar - I like my 2100 as well, and it's speedy enough with extra RAM. (if you go that route make sure you get one with the postscript upgrade kit - the base model only supports PCL.) FWIW, if your printer is slow you may want to see if you can upgrade the RAM - it doesn't take long for the mechanical bits to print stuff, but it does take awhile for the computery bits to render your page. more memory helps there. if you want something new and inexpensive, newegg has http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16828106219, which is a Lexmark. or, if you want to stick with HP, you could try http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16828104331. both HP and Lexmark make wireless adapters for their network lasers, though since they both have just plain ethernet ports on them, you could always bridge them to your wireless network using a http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833180021 if you don't wanna fiddle around with the printer sharing stuff on your airport express. (note that the wireless bridges will not work with a printer that doesn't have an ethernet port.)

I'm going to second clord's suggestion for the Brother HL-2070N (N being for Network, it's got built-in ethernet). It's a wonderful little printer. It doesn't do duplexing or 11x17, but it does have pretty good photo output. It's not going to match the quality of a black and white inkjet, but it's very, very good for a laser. Also, it's only $200USD. I've successfully (and easily, much to my surprise) used it on Linux, MacOSX, and Windows, too.