The FS-2020D puts in another excellent display for a business laser printer that swept all our printing awards and catagories. It dosn't get much better than this Kyocera printing marvel.

Superb quality, packed with features and cheap to run. A worthy alternative to the Kyocera.

Ignore the price – incredibly low running costs Make this a winner.

Top colour speeds are only achievable in draft mode, but output quality is quite remarkable

A fast printer let down by high running costs and few features

Beautiful double-sided prints, but it takes its time

Quick, cheap to run and an abundance of features – a worthy award winner

Very cheap to run, but poor print quality badly lets the side down

A solid workgroup mono laser that delivers above-average quality and plenty of features for the price.

A good quality and speedy colour laser printer, but the running costs are unsettlingly high.

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.

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.

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.

We originally debated whether or not to include a multifunction unit in this roundup as we feared it would not have been an apples with apples comparison, or that the print quality could not compare with the other printers on test. Given the performance of the SCX-4216F though, we were proven wrong.

Finishing second overall in our roundup the Epson EPL-6100 was edged out of first place by the HP 1300 and the OKI C5100, with its incredible range of features. However, this is not to say that the Epson EPL-6100 doesn’t have a wide range of functions. On the contrary, it boasts some innovative design and logical technological functions. Its large 250 page input tray makes it ideal for bulk printing, although it shares the same much smaller volume 100 page output tray capacities as both the Lexmark E321 and Minolta-QMS PagePro 1200W models.

Despite the recent flood of low-priced, high-quality inkjet printers, theres been comparatively little movement on the budget laser front, with Kyoceras FS-1000 (reviewed issue 34, p85) dominating our A-List since September last year.

Workgroup Office Laser Printer