At a time when credit is being crunched and banks are reluctant to let you have your own money, buying an economical printer that will hopefully last for a long time and perform multiple tasks has never seemed more sensible. If you're a small business owner in particular then Dell's latest All-in-One is definitely worth serious investigation.

Styled in no-nonsense black, the 2135cn colour laser printer is designed to copy, scan and fax in one small, space-saving device, so it has a comparatively small footprint (436 x 497 x 580mm). We don't advise moving it into position on your own, however, as it weighs 30kg and will undoubtedly do your back major damage.

Set-up will take a matter of minutes as it's just a question of removing the tape and packaging, slotting the toner cartridges into position, attaching the relevant leads and installing the driver software. Perhaps surprisingly, there is only one 250-sheet drawer at the bottom of the unit and a 150-sheet bin at the top, so if you have a more intense workload then you might be making several trips back and forth before your printing task is over.

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There's no duplex facility nor optional paper input accessories but the 400MHz processor's standard memory of 128MB can be expanded to 384MB and Dell reckons your maximum monthly duty cycle will be around 40,000 pages, printing at a resolution of 600 x 600dpi. Standard toners will yield 1,000 pages of black, cyan, magenta and yellow and high capacity upgrades will stretch to 2,500 pages each. The in-built toner management system automatically notifies you when toner levels are low.

When it comes to print speed, the maximum is 12 A4 ppm (pages per minute) in colour and 16ppm A4 in mono, although the average for mixed text and colour is around half this. On the other hand, the warm-up time is impressive at less than 30 seconds and for its size, the 2135cn has a relatively quiet operation.

We were also heartened by the image quality, both of the black text - which appeared solid and well defined - and also the colour reproduction, which was authentic and vivid thanks to Dell's Emulsion Aggregation Toner Technology which (it says here) uses smaller toner particles for closer pixels.

Network connection is via USB 2.0 and Ethernet and you can change your settings anywhere you have Web access thanks to Dell's proprietary Configuration Web Tool, a browser-based interface that saves you having to come into the office to make alterations.

As you'd expect from Dell, this is a solid, dependable workhorse that produces well above average text and colour reproduction with easy to use controls, and it's fairly eco friendly. It could perhaps have done with higher capacity in-trays, though, and an optional duplex unit.