Of all the reasons to buy a personal laser printer, perhaps the best we can think of is the balance between speed and quality. Take the HP P1005, for instance. At full pelt, for our 50-page mono document with 5% text, it ran at 15 pages per minute, which is the very maximum you’ll see from a standard inkjet printer in draft mode. Yet the pages that emerged had crisp, solid text, evenly applied toner, and the kind of quality that laser printers are famous for.

Even in our incredibly-demanding monochrome quality test, which pounds printers with a variety of high-resolution images, text styles and gradients to reproduce on paper, the P1005 excelled. When black text was printed against a grey background there were no legibility problems, and there was a pleasing lack of half-toning as well.

It’s fair to say that our high resolution image suffered slightly, with some detail lost from its darker areas, but the P1005’s strengths were evident when printing our business documents. Shaded graphs and charts emerged perfectly, with no hint of feathering when white text was printed against a black background.

It kept up its speed as well. A large, 24-page Word document bursting with images and graphics completed in just one minute 34 seconds, or 15 pages per minute, while a demanding 12-page Excel spreadsheet completed in 58 seconds. This is the most demanding test we throw at a laser printer, yet the P1005 ran at just over 12ppm and delivered outstanding quality.

The chassis of the printer itself is the only thing that betrays the $94 price tag. The body is made almost entirely of rather flimsy plastic, and the machine runs much louder than higher-end printers. Its out tray in particular feels like it won’t stand up to much abuse.

However, without any networking or workgroup features it’s unlikely that the P1005 will find its way into many offices, and as long as home users treat it with sympathy there’s no reason to suspect it won’t last for years.

The only real drawback is the lack of printer controls - the P1005 has just a single button for power, so the only way to abort a print job is through Windows’ rather idiosyncratic printer controls.

The P1005 is a best of breed printer: it doesn’t offer ever feature under the sun, but it’s fast, and it’s capable of finishing most home printing jobs with very good quality and in little time. Its price tag makes it utterly alluring for those with home offices.