Playing chicken. Going eyeball to eyeball to see who blinks first. At the poker table, saying “I’ll see your $100 and raise you $200.” In an old game show, taking one more spin of the wheel in “Press Your Luck.” In a new game show, turning down guaranteed cash for a chance to win more in “Deal Or No Deal.”

Printer manufacturers do the same thing, but moving down instead of up: It’s no longer rare to find a color laser printer priced under $1,000, so somebody introduces one for $700. Then another vendor whittles specifications and profit margins to hit $500. Then a cluster of companies trim their price tags to $400.

Now HP has launched a new entry-level printer, the Color LaserJet 1600, priced at $300. If we were host Howie Mandel, we’d wince and tell HP, “Ooh, you should have stopped at the last deal.”

HardwareCentral has a review of this printer and here are some of their thoughts.

The old and new HPs are outwardly identical, with the same single-pass printing engine rated at the same 8 pages per minute for both black-and-white and color documents — so monochrome print jobs tend to be slower than, but color output often faster than, color lasers based on four-pass printing technology.

They have the same 16MB of memory and 264MHz Motorola processor, with the same 600 by 600 dpi resolution plus HP’s PhotoREt 2400 technology that makes images look sharper than native resolution allows. They have the same 250-sheet letter- or legal-sized paper drawer at bottom and 125-sheet, face-down output bin on top.

But a nip here and a tuck there add up to a different printer. Compared to the 2600N, the Color LaserJet 1600 lacks an Ethernet connector, defining it as a USB 2.0 desktop device for a single user instead of small-office sharing. It supports Windows 98 SE, Me, 2000, XP, and Server 2003 but not Mac OS as its sibling does.

And the 1600, like too many of its competitors, pulls one of our least favorite cost-cutting stunts: It ships with what HP calls “introductory” or starter black, cyan, magenta, and yellow toner cartridges, so you’ll need to buy replacements after your first 1,000 pages. Inside the 2600N’s box, by contrast, you’ll find full 2,500-page black and 2,000-page color cartridges, worth $75 for black and $83 each for color. The premature replacement purchase will more than cancel out the new model’s $100 price advantage.