Lab

£150 laser printers

Mac users are often thought to be mainly graphic artists, with little love of black text and less of black numbers.

Truth be known though, there are plenty of Mac people who need good workaday correspondence and even the occasional worksheet print-out quickly and at low cost as part of their business. For them the obvious choice is not a nine-colour inkjet but a comparatively simple laser printer.

Laser printers have two key advantages over their ink-squirting cousins: they print a page at a time rather than a line at a time, and pages are dry as soon as they leave the machine.

These benefits mean that they are a lot quicker - four of the five devices tested here claim to produce 20 pages per minute (ppm) or more - and that the printed pages are not going to smudge if accidentally splashed or rained on.

We asked five manufacturers for their best shot at a laser printer costing £150 inc VAT or less at Internet prices - and didn't stipulate whether they should be mono or colour.

To its credit and our surprise, Canon entered a full-colour machine, with a claimed 8ppm, into the group just to keep things interesting.