HP has a huge range of laser printers, stretching from enormous 50ppm A3 corporate behemoths with full finishing capabilities to diminutive 10ppm personal lasers. Of all the printers in its considerable arsenal, its biggest seller by far is the LaserJet 4100 series...

A nice small footprint, which is an advantage in small office spaces, is the order of the day with HP’s offering to the mono marketplace. The LaserJet 1300 produced high quality text, with above average readability even on a grey background and at small point sizes. The embedded image on the test page was slightly over exposed, but still had good definition and solid well-formed black text, helping it to score highest overall in neutral text readability. Our monochrome test page turned up some minor blemishing and driver banding, but a reasonably smooth gradient helped the printer finish in first place overall here too.

One of the largest form factor printers in our roundup, HP’s Colour LaserJet 1500L has a giant footprint. Although not unattractive, with a purple ramp-like front cover, be prepared to sacrifice a reasonably sized piece of office real estate for this printer.

The 2300 series, HP's new laser offering for the small to medium-sized workgroup, includes a myriad of significant improvements over the previous 2200 series.

A workgroup printing workhorse that delivers classy mono and colour print quality.

The first thing we noticed about this printer was its strange physical resemblance to the Labs Winner, and significantly more expensive, HP LaserJet 1300. There are plenty of technical specs to differentiate the two, including RAM, print resolution and OS support, all swinging in HP’s favour though.

While it produced well-defined and solid text all the way down to small font sizes, the E321 did feature a few minor print quality shortcomings; these included heavy toner saturation, making the images dark and murky while poor dithering on gradients made the images appear banded and blotchy.

The LBP-2410’s real strength clearly lay in its speed, as opposed to its print quality. It was the third fastest printer overall, but fell in the shadow of the Labs Winner OKI C5100 for printing times and TCO over both low and high monthly duty cycles.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

One of the most impressive printers we received, it features plenty of well-thought out and logical technical features. One of only a handful of printers we tested that had an LCD for displaying print information and settings, the B4300 has eight single press buttons allowing you to view menu options, change values and cancel print jobs.

Fast, high-quality printing is now an affordable option for every business - large or small. We put nine of the best personal colour lasres to the test.