Xerox's entry-level colour laser printer is aimed at the home and small office markets and has the modest footprint to match. Decked out all in white with a blue highlight for the control panel, it manages to look smaller than it is, through clever design features like letting the paper tray stick out at the back, where it can't easily be seen.

Paper flows from a 250-sheet tray at the bottom of the printer and exits onto the top cover, from front to back. There's a single-sheet feed slot for special media just above the tray, but no option to increase the printer's flexibility by adding an extra paper tray.

The control panel is set into the curved front edge of the machine and includes a backlit 2-line by 16-character LCD display, together with two long, thin indicators to show online and error status. A simple arrow diamond enables menu navigation, though the Xerox takes the normal control paradigm and reverses it, so the left and right arrows cycle through the menus and the up and down arrows move through menu options.

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Surprisingly, for a machine at this price, both USB and Ethernet sockets are provided at the rear, so you can network this machine straight out of the box.

The print engine is an unusual design, with the photoconductor drums accessible from the front, once you've folded down the front panel, while the toner cartridges are accessed through a panel on the right-hand side. The machine is easy to set up and maintain and the software provided with it includes drivers for Windows, OS X and several Linux variants. There's a set of colour swatches, too, so you can adjust the colour output.

This may be necessary, particularly when printing photos, where the printer has a tendency to oversaturate colours. This is fine for business graphics, though, which come out looking bright and attractive. Black text is also excellent, with no sign of toner spatter and well formed characters, right down to small point sizes.

Although print speeds don't measure up to the published figures of 16ppm for black and 12ppm for colour, we still saw 10.5ppm and 8ppm, respectively, which is pretty good for an entry-level colour laser.

Running costs come out quite high, with an ISO black page costing around 3.4p and an ISO colour one costing just under 14p. With such a cheap asking price, Xerox has to make its money back somewhere and it looks as if it's pitched the consumables pricing to achieve this.

This is a great little colour laser printer that produces worthwhile black and colour documents, though you may need to tweak settings for satisfactory photo prints. Print speeds hold up well, though are some way short of the specified figures. Running costs are on the high side, even compared with other entry-level colour lasers, but the Phaser 6125 should be on any sub-£150 colour laser shortlist.