There are plenty of small and home offices that don't need the luxury of colour print, but where space is limited and the small footprint of an all-in-one machine is an advantage.

This is where the Samsung SCX-4200 is aimed. It's got a mono laser printer but is also fitted with a colour scanner on top, allowing it to be used as a photocopier to scan images straight to a PC.

About the size of a small microwave oven, the SCX-4200 sports a conventional design with a 250-sheet paper tray at the bottom of its front panel and a single-sheet feed slot directly above that.

Paper comes out from a third slot, just below the control panel, and the flatbed scanner is mounted behind this.

The control panel on top of the SCX-4200 enables direct photocopying and functions such as enlargement and reduction. There's a single-line, LCD display and the menu options are logical and easy to get to grips with.

The single piece drum and toner cartridge has a life expectancy of 3,000 pages. It's easy to fit and at a cost of around £50 gives a cost per page rating of around 2p, which is good for a multi-function device costing only just over £100. The cost per page is generally cheaper than an equivalent inkjet printer too.

Print quality is good, with crisp, dense, black text and finely detailed graphics. Grey tints are well reproduced and even photographic images are reasonable.

Photocopying, using the SCX-4200’s built-in scanner, is OK for text and photo images, but it struggles with documents printed on the machine that contain graphics and greyscale tints.

We couldn't get anything approaching the look of the original and were disappointed with these photocopying results.

Print speeds were not all we could have wished, either. As long as the machine is warmed up it will produce the first page of a printed document in around ten seconds.

However, if the SCX-4200 has been in sleep mode, you can add 35 seconds for it to chug into action.

For those that print intermittently, this warm-up time can be irritating. The scanner takes a similar time to settle, but this is more common with all-in-one devices.

Nevertheless, it's hard to berate it too much considering the price.

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