There's an increasing choice of budget colour laser printers and Konica Minolta's offering in the sub-£150 market is the Magicolor 1600W. This is a small-footprint machine, decked out in black and white, which looks neat and smart when closed.

It's not that neat when working, though, as the top cover folds open to become the output tray and the front cover folds down to make the input tray. There's no cover for this, so you either need to fold it closed when not in use and stow the paper, or risk dust and spillages.

Controls are simple, with low toner lights for each of the four toners as well as Ready and Error. There are buttons to cancel a job and to rotate the toner carousel, to get at each of the cartridges.

The printer is a four-pass machine, which means that when printing colour it lays down four separate layers one after the other, before transferring the complete image to the paper. This takes roughly four times as long as with an in-line mechanism, which lays down the complete image in a single pass. That's why Konica Minolta quotes a speed of 20ppm (pages per minute) for black print, but only 5ppm for colour.

Get the latest Dell Coupons and other computer coupons at CheapStingyBargains.com.

It gets reasonably close to both these speeds, returning just over 11ppm on a five-page black text document, rising to nearly 17ppm on a 20-page one. A five-page colour document gives 4.4ppm. So the speeds aren't bad and the black print speed is faster than most inkjets, even office models. Colour print, though, is slower than some liquid ink machines in the same price range, such as the HP OfficeJet Pro 8000 range, some of which can manage nearly 6ppm.

The quality of the pages it produces is fair. Black text is dense and solid, though there's a little more fuzziness around characters than from some other lasers. Colours are bright and vivid, ideal for zappy business graphics, though photo prints suffer a bit from the limited colour gamut of laser toner. They would be fine for in-document images, though, such as property particulars.

Colour toner is available in 1,500 and 2,500 page cartridges, though the black only comes in 2,500. You'll need to replace the imaging unit and fuser at different intervals, too, and working through all the maths gives costs per page of 3p for black and 12.7p for colour. The black cost is about average, but colour is on the high side, compared with similar machines.

This is a very serviceable colour laser at a good price. While it uses a slower, carousel print mechanism, it still manages a reasonable colour speed and a good throughput for black. Running costs are a bit on the high side if you aim to print a lot of colour, but for SOHO use it's a respectable choice.