Laser printers always used to be big, clunky machines that sat in the corner of the office or on a separate desk, where they could chunter away producing manifests and contracts. As the technology grew cheaper and the designs shrank, they moved onto the desktop, where they're still favoured over inkjets for producing crisp, black text.

Personal lasers start at around £150, cheaper if you shop around, and offer the kind of output that still impresses bank managers, course tutors and book editors. Print resolution of 600dpi is now standard, with resolution enhancement on most offerings. Resolution enhancement consists of slightly moving the dots of toner which make up text and graphics to smooth off edges and curves. It has the effect of making printed output appear to have a higher resolution than its true number of dots per inch.

Most personal laser printer manufacturers are now quoting speeds of 10 or 12 pages per minute, but this will vary with the content of the printed page - text prints faster than graphics. There's also a certain 'poetic licence' taken with print speeds, using documents composed of single characters and not allowing for the time it takes for the first page to be processed before printing. Real world text print speeds for personal lasers sit in the range 6-7.5ppm, which is still quick.

Then there's the cost of running your printer. Some require you to change the print cartridge every 2,000 prints, while others only stop for toner - like a photocopier - and can go for 6,000 pages between top-ups. Taking all of this into account here's how five leading models compare.

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