The one thing you really pay for in laser printers is speed. If you want a fast machine, suitable to share across a workgroup, there's a considerable price premium. The FS-4000DN from Kyocera Mita is rated at 45ppm (pages per minute) and, even at street prices, costs well over £700.

The design is conventional enough; a basic cube with a sloping control panel at the front. This includes a backlit, 2-line by 16-character display and an array of eight buttons, including two big ones to start and stop a print job. It may seem odd to have a start button for what is sold as a workgroup laser, but this is to handle prints of PDF files, which can be made from a memory drive plugged straight into the printer. This is a handy extra and offers security for files you don't want to leave in the output tray.

A whole ream of paper can be loaded into the FS-4000DN's main paper tray and there's a fold-down multi-purpose tray, too, which can take up to 100 sheets of special media. If you need more than this, Kyocera Mita can supply three extra input trays, a face-up output tray and a cabinet to support the printer, all as options.

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So what of the print speed? Printer makers nearly always rate their machines by printing simple documents in draft mode, so headline figures should be taken with a small cruet of salt. The highest single-sided print speed we saw in normal mode was just over 14ppm, less than a third of the rated top speed. With the built-in duplexer engaged we produced a two-sided document at 23 sides per minute, closer to the claimed speed of 33.5spm.

Speed is only half the equation, of course; the other half is print quality. This isn't as good as we've seen before from Kyocera Mita printers. While it's fine for text print, which is jet black and precise, the same can't be said for photos, or even business graphics. In both cases a series of fine micro-bands are apparent across the prints, which might cause problems, even for internal office use.

Print costs are very low, due to the permanent drum design common to all Kyocera Mita lasers. All you need buy is toner, which at around £70 for a 20,000-sheet cartridge gives a cost per page of only 0.8p. It's easy to fit, too, so maintenance is very simple.

This is a solid workgroup printer, quick to print - though somewhere short of Kyocera Mita's claims - and easy to expand. Running costs are low and it's only in the area of print quality that we have any queries. We may have been unlucky with our review model, but even a replacement drum and developer didn't cure things.