You get a lot of printer for your money with the Tally Genicom 8108N, measured in volume of metal and plastic. It's a big beast, sitting high off the desk and with a substantial footprint, so it's quite a surprise to discover the typical street price is only around £150.

Paper is loaded into a 150-sheet tray at the bottom of the machine and you can add a further 500-sheet tray underneath, if you need more capacity. Controls on top are simple, with a two-line, 16-character LCD display showing status information. Even without a backlight, this is easy enough to see under normal office lighting.

It's a simple enough machine to set up and get running, too, with a transfer belt mounted vertically and four slot-in toner cartridges in front, which build up each image colour-by-colour before transferring it to the paper. The belt itself is rated at 120,000 pages at 5 percent coverage, so can be considered a lifetime component.

That means running costs equate to just the toner cartridges themselves (ignoring electricity). With each cartridge costing around £70 for the standard capacity (1,500 sheets) or £90 for high-capacity (3,000 sheets), this gives best case running costs of 2p for a black text page and 11p for a 20 percent colour one. The black cost is reasonable, though over 10p for a colour page is on the high side.

The 8108N takes longer to print colour than black pages, but still manages a real-world 14ppm for black and around 6ppm for colour, neither of which is out of order for a machine in this price bracket.

Print quality is generally good, with high quality, spatter-free black print and good solid colours. Although they're solid, colours also come through darker than they should, so you may need to tweak lightness settings to get printed colour close to what you see on screen. There are three different colour modes in the printer driver, labelled Document, Photographs and Graphics. The default setting is Document, but it's worth switching between these when printing different types of document, to get better colour reproduction.

USB 2 is the standard local connection for colour and mono laser printers, but here there's an Ethernet connection too, so you can configure the printer as a shared, network device. Tally Genicom provides a network monitor utility as well as the standard printer driver, which offers facilities like multiple pages per sheet - though only up to four - and watermarks.

With the low purchase price often asked for colour laser printers, you might wonder if you're going to be paying through the nose for consumables. Although the running costs of the Tally Genicom 8108N are a bit higher than normal, they're by no means excessive. This is an easy-to-maintain colour laser, with reasonable output quality and a very competitive price.