Lexmark C530dn

It's impressive how much printer £240 will buy you these days. Many years ago, you'd pay this much for a decent colour inkjet. Now, you can buy a fully featured colour laser such as the excellent Lexmark C530dn for the same money.

And you don't have to give up too much, either. Not only can this printer deal with churning out colour page after colour page in a much more intensive environment than an inkjet can, but it also boasts network connectivity, an LCD panel and a duplex unit.

Those features put the C530dn right at the top of the colour laser printer pile this month, and it won't let you down when it comes to print quality, either. We found output quality, although not quite as good as the excellent HP Color LaserJet 2605dn, to be very close to it across the board. Photos and graphs looked vibrant, colours were reasonably accurate, and high scores were awarded in other areas, too. It's better than its chief rival this month - the Brother 4040CN.

For speed, it isn't quite as good, but in most cases it holds its own, printing 50 colour pages in 2mins 34secs seconds and the same number of mono text pages in 2mins 20secs. It struggles to print more complex, memory-hungry pages, though, with our image-heavy photo-montage page taking a mammoth 3mins 20secs to appear in the output tray.

Running costs are middling: after 50,000 pages, the C530dn will have cost you about £300 more than the Brother 4040CN and £430 less than the most expensive printer. But manageability is excellent, meaning the printer wouldn't be out of place serving a small office.

It all goes together to make an extremely impressive package. Print speeds aren't as rapid as the Brother 4040CN and neither are print costs, but if quality and duplex printing are what you're after the C530dn is the better choice.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith