Although prices of colour laser printers have been dropping over recent months, £140 (plus VAT) is still relatively inexpensive. This isn't a heavyweight model sold cheaply in the hope of making up income on consumables, either. The CLP-300 has been designed from the ground up as a personal colour laser.

The CLP-300 is styled simply, as a cube with a curved top-front edge. A 150-sheet multi-purpose paper tray projects from the bottom of the front panel and paper feeds to a tray set into the top of the case. To the right of this tray is a simple control panel with status indicators for each of the four toners, plus one for power and data. A single button enables you to cancel a running print job.

This is a carousel printer, meaning that each colour in a colour image is built up on the photoconductor drum before all four layers are transferred to the paper in one pass. This technique has the advantage of simplicity but is slower than an in-line mechanism, as the drum has to make four revolutions for each colour page.

Get the latest Dell Coupons and other computer coupons at CheapStingyBargains.com.

Most of the new design is in the print engine itself. Pull down the front cover and you can see four cylindrical slots which take drums of toner, each about the size and shape of a jar of honey. Each is colour-coded and you can only fit the right drum into its corresponding slot. A waste toner bottle clips in on the left-hand side and the photoconductor drum is the final consumable.

Each consumable needs replacing at a different frequency, with the colour toners, for example, lasting for 1,000 pages while the black toner should be good for twice that. When you work out the usage and price of each consumable, you come up with page costs of just under 3p for mono and just over 10p for colour prints. These are competitive with colour lasers from Samsung's main rivals.

Print speeds are also reasonable for a colour laser in this class, with our tests giving a mono print speed of nearly 10ppm and a colour speed of 3.75ppm.

Print quality is the only place where the CLP-300 doesn't quite stack up. Black print is over-heavy, and colour, which is fine for business graphics, looks over-vivid in photographic images. You can adjust for the latter within the print driver, but this is fiddly and most people will just want to plug in and print.

The CLP-300 hits four out of the five buttons you should want a colour laser to hit. It's inexpensive to buy, reasonably cheap to run, easy to use and maintain and prints quickly for its class. The only problem is a slightly heavy-handed print, which may need manual adjustment to get natural-looking images.