Epson Stylus Office BX925FWD inkjet printer-scanner device

Laser printers can offer several advantages over inkjet models.

If you need something more robust than a typical inkjet, you may be tempted to go for a colour laser but Epson may persuade you to look at its Stylus Office BX925FWD instead.

It's taller than many inkjet multi-function devices as it has two 250-sheet paper trays. It prints, scans and copies in black and white or colour, and faxes in black and white.

On top is a 30-sheet automatic document feeder beneath a fold-back feed tray and cover. Both the scanner (through the feeder) and the printer are double-sided, so two-sided copies are easy.

The control panel has an 8cm touch-sensitive screen bordered on either side by touch panels of individual buttons which illuminate orange when their functions are available. We had to press firmly to operate them and they offer no advantage over standard physical buttons.

There are two memory card slots, which take all the common types, and a USB socket for direct printing from a camera. It connects to a single computer over USB, or to a wired or wireless network. If your router supports the WPS standard connection is a matter of pressing a single button.

Epson reckons on speeds of 12 pages per minute (ppm) for black and 9.2ppm for colour prints in normal mode. We actually saw 13.2ppm for black under test, which is very fast for an inkjet, though the colour print gave a sluggish 1.9ppm.

The other notable speed is for double-sided prints: most inkjets struggle because they must wait for the ink to dry on the first side before printing the second. Epson has worked out how to do this with little waiting and this model produced a speed of 7.3ppm on our 20-side document. It also produced a 15 x 10cm photo print in 75 seconds, which is impressive.

Colour copies were slow because of the print speed, not the scanner - a single page took 29 seconds. Picture quality from the flatbed scanner was fine for an office device.

Print quality was good, with little ink bleed. Black text looked perfectly fine and colour graphics were bright, though blues and greens were a bit darker than intended. Photo prints came out very well, though again you may need to lighten some colours for best results.

The four ink cartridges are available in high-yield and very-high-yield versions, with the latter offering nearly 1,000 pages. Costs come out at 1.9p and 5.9p for standard black and colour pages respectively. You'd be very hard pushed to find a colour laser that can get close.

If you're going to be printing a lot, the low running costs of the Epson Stylus Office BX925FWD should offset its up-front price nicely.