Mono lasers have plummeted in price recently and Dell's Laser Printer 1100 is yet another to sit below the £100 mark. It prints monochrome A4 pages up to 14ppm (pages per minute), while the easy-to-use drivers provide support and automatic toner management.

By monitoring toner levels, the printer will warn you when the cartridge runs low, and direct you to the correct place on Dell's website to order a replacement. A 1,000-page starter toner cartridge is supplied as standard, but it also accepts a 2,000-page refill cartridge, costing £45.83.

Printing at 600 x 600dpi, it's capable of producing clear, crisp text, while shades of grey are rendered smoothly, without striping or banding. In our labs tests, all the test documents, apart from the full-page photograph, printed at, or very near, the rated speed of 14ppm at 600dpi.

The photograph appeared in little more than 20 seconds, but the built-in 2MB of Ram was insufficient to allow us to print this at the full resolution, forcing us to step down to 300dpi, which clearly affected the quality.

With a footprint of 358 x 299mm and smart, minimalist styling, you can tuck away the printer unobtrusively. It's also relatively quiet in operation, allowing you the convenience of keeping it close but not having noisy interruptions.

The Dell Laser Printer 1100 has no unnecessary frills, doesn't bother you with complex configuration issues and works well. On the downside, it's not Mac-compatible and lacks networking support.

If you like the look of this printer, you might want to first check out Samsung's ML-1610, which looks almost identical, is rated at 16ppm and is a fair bit cheaper.