At £163, Canon’s Lasershot LBP-5000 is cheap for a colour laser printer and with relatively low running costs; it makes for serious consideration if document printing is your game.

Paper feeds from a 250-sheet tray at the base and ejects onto its top cover. A second feed tray, of the same capacity, is available as an optional extra.

The Canon Lasershot LBP-5000 is quite unusual in using neither a carousel - where each of the four print toners cartridges are laid down on a large drum - nor a transfer belt, commonly used with the alternative, in-line mechanism. In this printer, each toner cartridge has its own small photoconductor drum, so each colour individually hits the paper as it feeds through.

This means maintenance is a doddle. When a cartridge runs out, simply fold down the front cover, slide out the empty cartridge and slot in a replacement.

There's no LCD display, just four LEDs that indicate what the printer is doing. It connects to a computer via USB2, though a network adapter is available as another optional extra. The software used to control the printer is easy-to-use, comprehensive and includes colour settings for different tasks, as well as multi-page prints and watermarks.

Canon rates the Lasershot LBP-5000 at 8ppm (pages per minute) for both black and white and colour prints. Under test we found this figure to be close to 5ppm, which still isn't bad. Print quality is excellent, with sharply defined, crisp, black text, vibrant colour graphics and even a fair attempt at the subtleties needed to reproduce colour photos. However, if photo-printing is your priority, stick with an inkjet.

Black and colour toner cartridges cost £42 and £44 for 2,000 and 2,500 pages, respectively. It gives print costs of just over 2.2p per page for black and just under 9p for colour pages. These are competitive figures and are noticeably better than some other colour laser printers in the same price bracket.

The Canon Lasershot LBP-5000 is a good value colour laser printer and is hard to fault.

Also consider
HP Color LaserJet 1600, www.hp.com/uk, £199 (£169 ex VAT) from www.pcworld.co.uk
Entry-level colour laser printer with low running costs.

Samsung CLP-300
Samsung puts brand new colour technology into a laser printer not much bigger than some mono printers

HP LaserJet 1018
A basic mono laser that prints for cheap

Lexmark C500n
Budget colour laser with built-in networking

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