Xerox Phaser 6130

The Xerox Phaser 6130 is one of the cheaper colour lasers this month, yet it's intelligently designed. The side-access door makes changing toner cartridges a breeze, and it's a reasonably small printer as well. It's also an impressively well-rounded machine, with good performance in all areas of our testing.

It comes with a built-in ethernet port for easy use on a network, and you can add wireless for £152 extra. There's no duplex unit, but this helps keep down the size, and you can very simply change settings using the LCD panel.

It prints at above-average speeds, with 1min 11secs for our Excel document and a decent 53 seconds for our complex A4 photo montage. Plain text speed is good but unspectacular - it took a little over three minutes to get through our 50-page mono document - and this is the one area where the print quality isn't quite up to scratch.

But in all other areas we were hugely impressed with the Xerox's output. Gradients were among the smoothest of the group, and the quality of photo prints was very high. If the Xerox's text quality could match its images, it would be a lot closer to an award this month.

As it is, it sits among the better models, but falls just short. It isn't hugely expensive to run, but never drops to a particularly cheap level, either. But with its low purchase price it offers pretty good value. Certainly, if you're looking for a cheap printer, the Xerox Phaser 6130 is the best you'll find, but after as little as 10,000 pages the award-winning Brother actually ends up costing you less.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith