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

Beautiful double-sided prints, but it takes its time

Painfully slow with colour, and the quality disappoints

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

Beguilingly affordable with great colour quality, but neither fast nor feature packed

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

Good print speed, high expansion potential and quality colour output makes the C9650n a great total printing machine.

A workgroup laser with a good turn of speed and low running costs, but we expect better quality at this price.

An A3 colour printer with a good turn of speed, quality colour output and low running costs.

A bargain printer that’s well worth considering if you only need occasional colour.

The C5600n handles colour-related tasks well and at a price that makes it affordable for small businesses.

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

The second most expensive printer to purchase, Epson’s C900 outlay cost is quite high given its fairly low quality results; as a consequence, this printer’s value rating suffers. Saving face, it managed to finish fourth overall for the speed portion of our testing. Surprisingly, for a printer of this cost, it is another unit to lack integrated network connectivity, although it is available as an expansion option.

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.

Clearly finishing first in the colour laser category, the C5100 is the pinnacle of affordable laser printing. Big and bulky, it doesn’t have a small footprint though, so be prepared to give up some of your workspace for it.

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.

Solid ink printing technology has had a tumultuous life.

Youll have to excuse the pun, but the MFC-9200c is far and away the big brother to the MFC-4600. There is no comparison in terms of size, and it efficiently uses that space to provide more features than its competition.