With new business-class inkjet printers from HP and Epson, there's a definite move to challenge the supremacy of the colour laser in the office. Epson's B-500DN is an industrial-strength inkjet, designed to be cheaper to run and to produce better colour than toner-bound equivalents.

It looks a bit as though Epson has said ‘build the print mechanism, get it working and then we'll put a case around it.' This is a big box of a machine, with an unexpected smaller box sticking out of its top, left-hand corner. This is where the four high-capacity ink cartridges plug in, with up to 8,000 pages of black ink and 7,000 of each colour keeping maintenance costs low; there are no transfer belts or fusers that need changing here.

Paper can be fed from a 500-sheet cartridge at the front or a 100-sheet tray at the rear, the tray revealed when you raise the top cover. All paper feeds out to a tray at the front, sitting on top of the paper cartridge. There's a built-in duplexer at the back, too, so you can print both sides of the paper in one job. The printer can take plain or glossy photo paper, from 15 x 10cm to A4 in size.

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The printer has a simple control panel, with a hard-to-read, two-line LCD display - why can't they put backlights on them all? - while at the back are sockets for USB and Ethernet; the B-500DN is fully networkable out of the box.

To be competitive with colour laser printers, a business inkjet needs a fair turn of speed. Epson quotes 33ppm for black or colour pages, but we saw 10ppm under test and 15 seconds for the first page out, against a claimed 3 seconds. We sometimes wonder if printer makers live in Fast World, where everything seems around three times as fast as it actually is; Epson is hardly alone in this wild print speed optimism.

Where an inkjet should be able to compete against a colour laser is in print quality. The B-500DN makes a brave attempt and the Durabrite pigmented inks give a pretty clean account of themselves, but text characters are still a bit less smooth and precise than from a laser. Switch to photo prints, though, and the tables are turned. The detail and natural colour from this printer is better than anything we've seen from a laser.

Costs, if you use the highest-capacity cartridges, are excellent, with black pages costing around 1.3p each and colour coming out at 2.7p. The colour cost, in particular, is very low for either type of printer.

Epson makes a good case for the B-500DN to be considered against colour office lasers. It costs roughly the same to buy, is much cheaper and easier to run, has a fair turn of speed, gives good text and graphics and excellent photos. It might look a bit odd and is unexpectedly noisy when printing, but could still be the ideal alternative to a toner-based office workhorse.