Laser printers used to be the sole preserve of busy offices, due mainly to their high purchase price and their ability to churn out pages and pages of text very cheaply.

Since then, however, prices of laser printers have tumbled and are now well within the reach of anyone who wants to print as cheaply as possible without being bothered about colour.

The reason laser printers are so cheap to run is the way in which they work. Where inkjet printers use costly liquid ink that only lasts for a few hundred pages, laser printers use a powdered 'toner' that lasts for several thousand. This is supplied in a toner cartridge that simply slots into the printer and is replaced when it's empty.

Toner cartridges typically cost £40 and can print around 3,000 pages before running dry. Some printers use a cartridge that has an integrated drum (more about this later) and this can bump up the price of replacement toner, but usually not by much.

As the name suggests, laser printers make use of a laser beam. Each page that is sent from a computer to the printer is 'drawn' by the laser beam onto an electrically sensitive metallic drum.

The drum picks up an electrical charge wherever the beam hits, which means the powdered toner can stick to it.

The toner is then transferred to a piece of paper simply by rolling over it and the paper is heated to fuse the toner in place. That's why pages printed by a laser printer are always warm.

The drum will lose its ability to hold a charge over time, at which point it needs to be replaced. However, you can expect to print tens of thousands of pages before this happens. Of course, this isn't a problem with those laser printers where the drum is replaced at the same time as the toner cartridge.

We've rounded up six laser printers for you to cast your eye over, with prices ranging from £90 to £210.

BROTHER HL-1430
The Brother HL-1430 has a traditional laser printer design, with the paper tray at the bottom and a tray for prints at the top.

This reduces the amount of space the printer takes up, but don't forget that the paper tray needs room to be slid out when it has to be reloaded.

The tray has an indicator to show how much paper is left and individual sheets can be fed into a slot, if you want to print on headed paper, for example.

Accessing the toner cartridge is as simple as opening the front of the printer and the toner cartridge can be replaced separately from the drum.

The options in the printer driver are clearly set out. As well as the common option for printing multiple pages on one sheet, you can also opt to blow up one page over several sheets.

The advanced settings are a little harder to navigate as there is just an icon to represent each setting where a text description would have been more useful.
Price: £130
Contact: www.brother.co.uk

CANON LBP 1120
The Canon LBP 1120's paper trays are both on top of the printer, with paper stacking in each vertically. This cuts down on desk space but it does mean that pages are bent almost double when they're printed.

There is an option to send prints through a slot on the front of the printer, though, which is handy for printing onto thicker media.

The printed manual is excellent for setting up the printer but anything more requires reference to the manual on the CD. This manual is very comprehensive but it is always easier reading a printed manual.

The printer's driver has all the extra features you would expect, including the ability to print several pages on one sheet and watermarking.

A very useful extra is the ability to save your settings as different profiles, making it quick and easy to switch between settings that are used regularly.
Price: £130
Contact: www.canon.co.uk

EPSON EPL-6200L
Epson raised our hopes of coming across a good printed guide by having the thickest of all the manuals supplied here.

Unfortunately, it covers no fewer than 29 languages and only 26 pages are devoted to English. Luckily, the manual on the CD is more helpful.

The Epson uses an upright design with a door in the front to access the toner cartridge. It is possible to replace the toner without changing the drum.

In our tests, the Epson was comfortably ahead of the rest of the printers in the group test in terms of speed. This should be set against the running costs, however, which were at the more expensive end of the scale.

The printer driver has a zoom feature which is very useful if you are trying to print out a document that was originally designed for a different size of paper.

The driver helpfully shows all the settings and their effect, no matter which screen you are in. This makes complicated set-ups quite easy but there's no way of saving these settings for future use.

If you need to print lots of long documents, the extra speed of this printer will save you a lot of time. However, some of the more complicated driver settings mean it isn't such a good choice for the beginner.
Price: £160
Contact: www.epson.co.uk

KONICA MINOLTA PAGEPRO 1300W
Like the Epson, the Konica Minolta has an upright design and a large paper manual that covers more than 20 different languages. Again, there is a far more comprehensive manual on the CD.

The PagePro 1300W supports both USB and parallel connections to a computer and has the highest resolution of the group. This gives better text quality, especially on particularly small text.

In our tests, however, the paper was very hot when it came out of the printer and this could cause problems with cheap paper.

Paper is stored in a tray at the bottom of the printer, which can be folded up to save space when not in use. There are a couple of lights and a power switch to one side.

Like the other printers of this design, there is a door at the front to access the toner cartridge. This is separate from the drum unit.

The only potential problem with this is that they come out of the printer together with a catch to release the toner. This makes changing the drum easier but it would have been good to be able to leave the drum in the printer unless it needed replacing.

There is also a helpful sticker on the inside of the door with the part codes for the toner and drum units, so there is no need to dig out the manual when these need replacing.

The driver settings pages are easy to navigate. Unlike some drivers, most of the options are available on the main page and it is much easier to see all the different options together rather than scroll through them.

An icon sits in the Windows System Tray to alert you if the printer has any problems. Should this happen, the icon turns red, and double-clicking on this reveals a window with information about the error and helpful advice.
Price: £90
Contact: www.konicaminolta.co.uk/printer

HP LASERJET 1010
Opening the box of the HP LaserJet 1010 reveals a set-up poster with a CD nestling alongside the printer. The poster is very good and makes the printer's set-up very simple indeed.

The printer is easy to get into, whether you are removing jammed paper or changing the toner. The drum unit is built into the toner cartridge, so there is no opportunity to reduce running costs. Using the normal capacity toner cartridge the LaserJet 1010 works out at over 3p per page.

The biggest problem with this printer is the running cost. The toner has the lowest expected life span among the printers tested, but the cost does not reflect this. The result is a price per page that is just over our estimated figure for an inkjet.
Price: £130
Contact: www.hp.com/uk

LEXMARK E321
The Lexmark E321 looks quite small compared to the other printers here, due in part to its matt black livery. Paper goes in and out the top of the printer, saving space at the front.

The only snag with a system like this is to make sure that paper is removed from the output tray often enough to prevent jamming, particularly since the input tray holds more than the output.

In our tests, the Lexmark was the second fastest printer with a very respectable score of nearly 19 pages per minute. Unfortunately, this does come at a cost because the Lexmark E321 works out as the second most expensive printer to run.

Although the toner and drum are built into the same unit, it is supposed to last for 3,000 pages so there should be some time between replacements. Combined with the high initial cost, bargain hunters should look elsewhere for a laser printer.
Price: £210
Contact: www.lexmark.co.uk

Hot stuff
Given that there was once a huge gap between inkjets and lasers, all of these printers are very impressive. The Epson is unmatched for speed and, even though it was one of the more expensive to run, it still cuts a third off the price per page of an inkjet printer.

Speed alone cannot win a Computeractive test, however, and so the award goes to the Konica Minolta PagePro 1300W for its great value and impressive all round specifications.

It has the highest resolution and one of the lowest running costs, partly due to the separate toner and drum. Print speed was also very respectable and is significantly better than an inkjet.

The variety of designs of the printers in this group test should be food for thought, depending on the space available, and we liked the space saving design of the PagePro 1300W. All in all, if you do more than an occasional printout, a laser printer is worth serious consideration.

Questions of cost
Laser printers can work out cheaper than inkjets on a couple of fronts and the first is paper. Where inkjets give their best results on costly coated paper, lasers give the same razor sharp text whether they're printing on cheap photocopier paper or the finest Basildon Bond.

They're not quite as versatile when it comes to printing on other media but, as long as you choose laser printer-compatible envelopes and overhead transparencies, there shouldn't be any problems.

Toner also works out cheaper than inkjet ink, although that gap has closed somewhat recently, especially if you use third-party ink refills.

Toner is cheaper mainly because you buy more of it at a time; an inkjet cartridge is measured in hundreds of pages whereas a laser is measured in thousands.

Some printers also allow you to buy just the toner and not the drum that goes with it. This is much like only buying ink for your inkjet without buying the print heads to go with them, something we have repeatedly said offers the best value. Either way, most laser printers offer a lower cost per page over time.