The KX-FLB851E is a laser-based multi-function machine, offering mono printing, copying and faxing and colour scanning. Panasonic claims it's particularly easy to use and also points to its three output bins, which help separate out its key office functions.

This is a substantial machine, looking more like a traditional office photocopier than a multifunction device. The well-designed control panel lies along its long side and its 250-sheet paper tray also opens from the side, so you stack paper into it landscape fashion, rather than portrait. An optional second tray can be fitted underneath, to increase the machine's overall capacity to 750 sheets.

Panasonic has fitted a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) to the KX-FLB851E, so you can copy, fax and scan multi-page documents with ease and the three output trays can be set up to take either collated documents or documents resulting from the print, copy and fax functions.

The control panel is particularly well designed, with a 16-character by two-line LCD display in the centre, bordered on either side by a telephone number pad with start and stop buttons and a set of 10 fast-dial buttons for quick faxes. In front of the display is a four-away, circular button for navigating the device's menu system and three large buttons for selecting fax, copy and scan.

Hinging the main scanner body of the device up from the right reveals the laser printer mechanism inside and this requires toner every 5,000 pages and a new drum every 10,000 pages. You'll also need to buy a maintenance kit, but only every 60,000 pages, so the machine is not maintenance-intensive.

Printed output from the KX-FLB851E is very good for a laser-based device. Text comes through sharp and clear and even halftone images, such as from photographs, are surprisingly well reproduced. The only glitch we saw was a page header which reproduced in black rather than greyscale, but we put this down to a driver software glitch and would expect this to be sorted in a future update.

Under test we produced 10ppm when printing from a PC, through the machine's single USB 2 connection. While not as fast as claimed, this speed is still fine for the kind of small workgroup into which the device is likely to be put.

Print costs, at around 2.8p per page, are on the high side for a laser device, but in the end actual costs will depend on the price you can find for the toner and drum consumables.

While there is little doubt that this is a robust and serviceable office multifunction machine, the asking price is considerably higher than for equivalents from rival manufacturers. For this reason, we suggest you examine machines with a similar spec from a variety of suppliers, before deciding which to go for.