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Colour laser printers are often thought of as big, expensive and really only suited to a large office. This month we can happily disprove these myths, as they've become much cheaper, lighter and more streamlined. In fact, with the cheapest printer here costing just £114, they are finally within most people's budgets.

A colour laser printer is a great choice if you need to print high-quality documents fast, whether you're producing a presentation or letting the kids print their homework.

This month we test nine of the most affordable printers. Each will do a good job at home or in a small office, but two of them can also cope with the demands of a busy office. We've tested them all for speed and print quality, and calculated their running costs, so you can find the right printer for your budget now and during the printer's life.

Colour laser printers can produce large numbers of pages quickly, and are known for printing clear, high-quality documents with no smudged text or images. They're excellent for printing formal documents, copies of webpages or just pages of mono text and can be cheap to run.

Each printer in this review produces sharp text and good-quality colour images. Some excel at producing mono documents quickly but suffer from expensive and less-impressive colour prints, while others create sharp and accurate colour prints but cost more to buy.

If you want to print double-sided booklets or save paper, an automatic duplexer is valuable, and if you print in great volume, a large paper tray can be vital.

We'll help you choose the right printer, whether you want to print high-quality colour presentation documents or simply need quick and reliable mono prints and the occasional colour print.

Interfaces

Most of the printers we've looked at have both USB and Ethernet ports, although the two with the best colour quality that cost under £260 support only USB. USB printer connections are typically very easy to set up; it's simply a matter of installing the driver and plugging in the cable. You can use Windows' built-in printer sharing system to enable other PCs on a network to connect to your USB printer, but it's more practical to buy a printer that can connect to a network on its own if you're buying it to share with multiple computers.

Network printers can be hard to configure, but several of them have installers that auto-detected our network settings perfectly. Our report cards detail any problems we encountered. Two of the printers have parallel ports, although you're unlikely to need them unless you're still using a legacy system.

Whichever type of connection you'll use, remember to buy appropriate cables to attach your printer to your PC or network, as none of these printers comes with any.

Costs and consumables

Although you can buy a budget colour laser printer for the same price as a high-end inkjet, laser printers often require a lot of expensive consumables. Fortunately, most of these don't have to be replaced very often.

Toner cartridges are the consumable you'll have to replace most frequently. Most printers come with a partially filled toner cartridge, although even the most poorly supplied printer in the group comes with 1,000 pages' worth of both mono and colour toner. While mono print costs are usually inexpensive, colour costs can be quite high, as these use toner from three colour cartridges.

All laser printers use a drum, also known as the Organic Photo Conductor (OPC), to create a page. The drum is given a positive charge, and a laser traces the image of a page on to it, discharging the areas it touches. Positively charged toner is released on to the drum and is attracted to these discharged areas. The toner is then heated and fused to a sheet of paper to create the print.

Some printers here, such HP's LaserJet models, incorporate the drum into the toner cartridge, so toner is the only consumable. This helps keep costs down. Most printers, however, use drums that must be replaced separately.

This is unlikely to be a frequent expense in anything but the busiest offices, as a drum will often last for 45,000 pages or more. Be aware that in some cases the drum can't be replaced, so the printer's life ends with the drum. Our reviews and table tell you when and if the drum needs replacing.

Laser printers require other replaceable parts. Waste toner containers are the most common, but are cheap and easy to replace. Printers intended for heavy use, such as Brother's HL-4050CDN, often have other replaceable parts, such as the belt unit that transfers the image from the drum to the paper.

Speed and quality

The table also shows which printers put in the best performance in terms of speed. We list both the manufacturers' claimed maximum speeds and the results of our own tests.

Single-pass printers transfer black, cyan, magenta and yellow content to the page in a single operation. These are potentially faster than printers that create four page images and apply each to the page separately. However, single-pass printers don't always print colour as quickly as they do mono, and many of the four-pass machines have similar colour print speeds.

Whether prints look good or not can't be determined by quantitative tests, so we print a series of images designed to test the colour accuracy, quality of shading, contrast and detail produced by the printers. The results of these findings can be found in our reviews.