Kyocera has long championed the greenness and economy of its laser printers, as it's one of the few companies which uses a lifetime photoconductor drum. All you need to run its FS-1020D personal / small workgroup printer is a supply of toner and plenty of A4 paper.

The FS-1020D is never going to win any awards for looks, being pretty much a cube with the corners rounded off, but there are few lasers that really set the design world alight. It's functional, with a 250-sheet paper tray sitting under the printer and feeding paper through an S-shaped path to arrive on its top surface. You need to flip the paper-stop forward for A4 paper, otherwise pages tend to slide off the front.

A multi-purpose tray hinges down from the front of the machine and an access cover at the rear enables you to clear any paper jams. The front of the top panel hinges forward so you can refill the toner hopper. Physical controls are simple, with just two buttons to turn the printer on and off line and to cancel a print job. Four indicator lights show 'ready', 'job in progress', 'attention needed' and 'low toner'.

The software drivers, running under Windows, MacOS or Linux, provide all the usual facilities and there's good network control, too, so you can access the device from any machine on your network. The network interface is optional; parallel and USB 2.0 connections are provided as standard at the back. The printer supports PCL6, PostScript 3 in emulation and Kyocera's own page description language, Prescribe.

Printed output is quick, with a 20-page document taking about one minute and fifteen seconds. If you print double-sided - the FS-1020D has a built-in duplexer to handle this - it still takes under two minutes and 45 seconds. Quality is as good as from any laser in this price band, with dense blacks for text and reasonable greyscales for photo images, though photos do show a little banding.

When it comes to running costs, what Kyocera says about the printer is true. A toner cartridge, good for 7,200 pages at 5 percent cover, is typically £58, giving a cost per printed page of just 0.8p, plus paper. This is much lower than from most of its rivals and, with the comparatively large toner capacity, you shouldn't need to refill it too often.

Anybody with a home office or a small business, who doesn't need colour output, could make good use of this printer. It packs a lot into its small frame and low price, with fast, high-quality printing on both sides of the paper. It's also low-maintenance, in terms of both time and money.