Lexmark has long had a good name as a manufacturer of laser printers, but with a price of £240 plus VAT even at street prices, the mono-only E352dn needs to have something up its sleeve. That something is print speed, which Lexmark quotes at 33ppm and we measured at 19ppm.

This is fast for a desktop laser printer, though it's not easy to see why high speed is vital in a machine designed for small workgroups and with a standard paper tray holding just 250 sheets. An optional second tray, holding 500 sheets, can be fitted underneath the machine.

The printer has a squat, nicely curved design and is coloured in dark grey and silver. At the top of the curved front panel is a neat control panel, consisting of a 16-character by two-line LCD display, a ring of buttons to navigate its menus, and buttons to start and stop print jobs.

Pages feed to a depression in the top of the printer and if you're printing duplex - that is, on both sides of the paper in a single job - each sheet is drawn back into the printer from here to print the second side.

The E352dn can be connected up via its USB 2 or Ethernet sockets, both of which are standard, and the software supplied with the machine consists of the driver and a network monitor tool. They're easy to install from the supplied CD and the driver includes useful facilities such as printing watermarks, posters, multiple pages per sheet and booklets, using the machine's duplex function.

Its toner and drum unit is a two-part consumable, with the toner cartridge clipping into the drum tray. The complete assembly slots in behind the fold-down, front cover. The drum should only need replacing after 30,000 pages at five percent coverage, but the toner cartridge will need changing after either 3,500 or 9,000 pages, depending on the cartridge you choose.

The print cost comes out at 1.8p per page, which isn't high, but is above some of its main competitors. Excellent print quality would mitigate against this, but the Lexmark machine only has this when printing text. Here it's sharp and well-defined with minimal toner spatter.

Printing graphics, particularly photographs, is not so good, though, with noticeable banding and some very obvious dither patterns, even when the 2,400dpi print quality mode is set. The E352dn has a native resolution of 1,200dpi, but prints from the machine look lower than this.

The E352dn is certainly fast and its abilities to print duplex and via a network are useful extras, but poor print quality for graphics and particularly photographs detracts from its overall appeal. While you wouldn't buy a mono laser primarily for printing photos, it's amazing how many documents now include at least some picture content, and a good printer should cope with this content.