The printer people at Samsung certainly know how to put design thought into their products. Last month, the ML-1630W blew us away with its centrefold looks, and this month it's the turn of the ML-2855ND.

Admittedly, this one is less of a head-turner than its all-black sibling, but it still stands out as unusual among high-volume business printers with its muted grey colour scheme, subtly curved corners, and surprisingly compact dimensions.
Alas, elsewhere, the ML-2855ND fails to keep up appearances.

The first problem is its capacity. We'd expect a total input capacity of more than 300 pages for this sort of money, especially when you consider its maximum monthly duty cycle of an impressive 50,000 pages.

But it isn't here where the biggest problems occur. The major source of our concerns is its lacklustre speed - a 28ppm rating simply isn't fast enough for a printer at this price.

And in our tests it proved the slowest of the 28ppm lasers this month, outputting pages at an average rate of 25ppm. To put this performance into perspective, not only is it slower than all the printers in this month's group, but also the majority from last month's Labs.

The ML-2855ND's output quality begins to redeem things a touch: this printer is capable of producing outstanding text with clean edges, deep blacks, well-formed characters at all point sizes, and very little satellite toner spattering.

Its photographic output isn't bad, either: although there's some horizontal banding, images pack a punch thanks to smooth dithering and crisp contrast. Graphics look good, too, with gradients reproduced in as smooth a manner as you could possibly wish.

But it's back down to earth with a bump, unfortunately, when it comes to value for money. Although the features are up there with what we'd expect from a business laser - duplex, Ethernet and a good helping of memory (64MB) - the price of the unit is good but the cost of consumables makes it one of the most expensive to run, costing over $1700 for 50,000 pages.

All told, this Samsung is likeable but distinctly middle of the road. Even if running costs aren't important to you, the Lexmark offers more for your money.