The cost of colour laser printing rises drastically if you need to print pages larger than A4. While you can buy a colour A4 printer for around £160 - though OKI's cheapest A4 colour laser is about £280 - this company's A3 colour laser, the C8600n, comes in at a whopping £1,400. So how is the price difference justified?

For start there's the size; you're not paying for a big printer, but rather a small one. A3 printers are traditionally huge, but OKI has managed, by a combination of clever design and use of its trademark high-intensity LED engine (there's no laser beam involved), to keep the C8600n not much bigger than some mono lasers. It's still heavy though; a definite two-person lift.

The printer follows a conventional design, just bigger in most respects. The 300-sheet paper tray can take A3 sheets or A4 loaded sideways, and there's a 100-sheet multi-purpose tray above this. Prints feed to the top surface of the machine and there's a small control panel set into the front, with a 16-character by 2-line LCD display and simple controls for print configuration.

At the back, you can connect the printer through USB 2 or Ethernet, as a local or networked device. The software driver offers most of the usual controls and includes banners, posters and watermarks. Installation of consumables is a bit fiddly, as you have to remove blanking plates on all the cartridges and this setup isn't helped by a poor, and much too small, quick start sheet.

Prints from the C8600n, in both A4 and A3, are finely detailed and sharp. Text is dense and black while business graphics are vivid and without unsightly dithering. Photographic images are also well reproduced and although the printer, like all colour lasers, suffers from a comparatively small colour gamut compared to inkjet machines, results here are better than most. There's a slight gloss to black and colour prints which some people may not like, but printed output from the machine is generally well above average quality.

There are several different consumables, all of which appear to have different usage rates, so toner cartridges typically last for around 6,000 pages while the photoconductor cartridge lasts 20,000 pages, the transfer belt 80,000 pages and the fuser unit 100,000 pages.

When you work all these costs through you get a 5 percent black page cost of just over 1.6p and a 20 percent colour cost of 8.7p. The first of these is comparatively low, while the second lies in the middle of the range for a colour laser.

This is a well-made colour laser printer that can cope with pages twice the size of A4. It prints quickly - over 10ppm for black or colour A4 - and produces high quality output at costs that are similar to its main competition. The rounded lines of the printer have a dated feel, but only this and its heavyweight asking price can be held against it.