Xerox has a wide range of colour laser printers and multifunction devices and the Phaser 6110MFPX sits towards the bottom end of this range. Designed for the small or home office, it majors on ease of maintenance and comparatively small size.

It has a pretty conventional design for a multifunction printer, with the colour laser print engine at the bottom and a flatbed scanner, complete with Automatic Document Feeder (ADF), mounted sideways on top.

The paper feed tray can take up to 150 sheets at a time and there's a single-sheet, special media feed built into the top of the paper tray. 150 sheets is pretty meagre for an office machine and even with the optional second paper tray fitted, there's still only room for 400 sheets at a time.

The ADF can take up to 50 sheets, but you can also use the scanner glass for single documents or pages from books. A third way of getting images into or out of the Phaser 6110MFPX is via a USB drive, which you can plug into the socket on the front of the machine. This enables you to walk up and print PDF, BMP, JPEG or TIFF format files directly, or to scan from the Xerox machine to your drive, both of which are handy extras.

The dark blue control panel is logically laid out, with quick-dial numbers for the machine's fax facility on the left and big Start and Stop buttons on the right. In between are illuminated mode buttons and a 2-line by 16-character LCD display. The machine can be connected via either USB or Ethernet network.

Getting at the toner cartridges, which normally last 1,000 pages for colour and 2,000 pages for black (though 700 and 1,000 pages respectively for the starter cartridges) is simplicity itself, as each slots into the front of the machine, a bit like control rods in a nuclear reactor. An imaging unit is the only other consumable and this lasts for 20,000 black pages or 12,500 colour ones.

Print quality is only mediocre, with black text coming through over-black and slightly smudged, if printed over colour. Unusually, photo reproduction is a bit better, with less striping than is often visible from mid-range colour lasers. Print times are slow, and we measured just over 8ppm and 3.5ppm for black and colour pages, respectively, against quoted speeds of 16ppm and 4ppm, though such discrepancies are common with printers.

Print costs work out at around 3p and 12p for black and colour pages, and these are high in comparison with those for other colour laser-based multifunction machines in this price bracket.

The Xerox Phaser 6110MFPX is a neat little multifunction device with versatile scanning, copying, printing and faxing abilities. However it's not particularly quick, is quite expensive to run and print quality is no better than average. If you choose to buy it, do so for its feature set, not for the cost or quality of its output.