Personal, mono laser printers still sell surprisingly well and Canon's new i-SENSYS LBP3100 adds a couple of clever refinements. About the size of a small breadmaker, the printer looks suitably white and glossy on the desk and even when you open up its paper tray and top cover, which becomes the output tray, it has a surprisingly small footprint.

The trouble with leaving this type of printer open is the build up of dust on the paper stack, but Canon has thought of this and integrates a folding cover, which disappears inside the printer when it's closed. There is a single sheet, multipurpose feed just above the cover, too.

A single ‘resume' button and LED indicator form the only manual interface, apart from a power button at the front. At the back is a single USB socket and the USB plug is hidden by a small hinged cover. We could see more point to this if the socket wasn't positioned near the top of the printer, so the cable drapes across the desk. There's a baffle near the paper output slot which appears to have a similar cosmetic function.

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Lift the top cover and you can install the combined drum and toner cartridge, which is the only consumable in the i-SENSYS LBP3100. The retail cartridge prints 1,500 pages, but the one in the box is a half-filled starter version, capable of just 700 pages. Most of the big printer manufacturers play this stingy game, so you have to start buying consumables that bit sooner.

When you cost out the cartridge, this Canon printer produces an ISO page for around 2.4p, which is about average for a sub-£100, mono laser. Canon claims a print speed of 16ppm for this machine and we got unusually close to this when printing our 20-page test document. It gave a speed of 15.2ppm, a bit faster than the five-page document, which recorded 11.5ppm. A 15 x 10cm photo print completed in 15 seconds, so this is a surprisingly quick machine given the market it's aimed at.

The quality of its output is also good for an entry-level printer, with clear, sharp text and even - if a little mono-tonal - greyscales. Our photo, printed at the top resolution of 2,400 x 600dpi, still showed a dot pattern in the image and some of the darker areas merged to black. Even so, overall, output from the printer is pretty impressive.

If you have no need for colour print but want quick and clear mono output, then the i-SENSYS LBP3100 offers this in a neat, small footprint. With its novel, fold-out paper tray cover, you can leave it loaded with paper without risking dust and debris entering the mechanism. At under £75 it's something of a bargain.