I'm in love! She's curvaceous, she's colourful and she's the surprisingly affordable HP Color LaserJet 2605.

Forget big and bulky; colour lasers have really moved on in the last couple of years. Even with this reviewer's bad back I had no trouble lifting the CLJ 2605 out of its box and onto a desk, where it took up little more space than the average PC.

The first colour printers were also horrendously difficult and messy to set up but, again, that's all changed. The new Color LaserJet comes with four separate toners (cyan, yellow, magenta and black) already installed. All you have to do is pull out the shipping tabs and it's ready to go.

OK, there's a little more to it than that. You have to install a printer driver, with PCL and PostScript drivers provided for both Windows and Apple Mac deployment and Linux software also available. Plus you have to connect to the printer, but that's quite easy too, with a choice of either USB or, on network models like the 2605dn we tested, a 10/100Mbps Ethernet interface. A print server is also built into the 2606dn, with a Web-based management interface and SNMP support.

Finally, you need to put some paper in the 250-sheet A4 tray provided, to which an optional extra tray (£79 + VAT) can be added underneath, doubling the capacity. Plus there's the usual manual feeder for things like envelopes and transparencies and an optional duplexer (standard on the 2605dn and 2605dtn) to print on both sides of the paper.

A 300MHz Freescale Coldfire V5e processor provides the necessary motive power. Not a chip you're likely to come across anywhere else but it certainly seems to do a good job. Plus there's 64MB of memory which can be further expanded, up to 320MB if required, simply by plugging in an industry standard DIMM.

Maximum print resolution is only 600dpi, but that's more than adequate for most documents and HP adds it's own ImageREt 2400 technology to further enhance image quality. And the end result is impressive to say the least, with crisp black text, good colour blocking and excellent photo reproduction. Glossy paper further helps when printing photos, while for digital camera enthusiasts the top-end 2605dtn model (£349 + VAT) has slots to directly handle most kind of memory cards.

If you look really hard you can find faults with the output, but you really do have to look hard. Moreover, to improve on the results you'd need to spend a great deal more than the £219 + VAT starting price.

Of course you also have to factor in the running costs, with each cartridge slated to last for around 2,000 pages and the black cartridge good for 2,500. Black cartridges can be had for around £42 + VAT and the colours £46 + VAT each which, assuming you mange to print 2,000 pages, works out at a shade under 11p per page (including VAT). A lot more than a monochrome laser and on a par with a colour inkjet, but then a laser needs less maintenance and, with a duty cycle of 35,000 pages per month, is eminently shareable.

Now don't run away with the idea that I've been blinded by love for the Color LaserJet 2605 - she does have her faults. Such as making you wait a good 20 seconds before deigning to print any document and pausing mid-document for what seems like an eternity whenever any extra image processing is required. Top speed is 12ppm for black and white and 10ppm for colour, but if you're printing images, half that is more realistic. Still, it's pretty nifty and the results really are excellent.

Plus it's a remarkably quiet and fume-free laser, making it a good choice in an open plan office or for home use. And at £299 + VAT for colour, networking and a duplexer, who can blame me for falling in love?

A very compact colour laser printer that's easy to manage and affordable to both buy and run, giving excellent results whether printing colour photographs or general purpose business documents. Optional duplexer and networking support are also available, making for a good business or home user solution.