It's hard to believe the prices of mono laser printers; not because they're high, but because you get a lot of printer for not a lot of money. By browsing round the Web, this Samsung ML-2250 can be had for under £80. What you get for that money is a smart, white and pale grey, high-gloss box, which looks just as good in a small office as at home.

A 250-sheet paper tray tucks away underneath, and the paper ejects to a tray indented into the top cover of the machine, in the conventional way. A second, multi-purpose tray unfolds from the front of the printer for special media or up to 50 sheets of paper.

There are just two indicator lights on the top surface, one showing when it's on-line and the other when toner-save is engaged. Toner-save is a useful function when you're printing drafts and other documents that you'll only be using yourself.

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Around the back there's a protrusion running the full width of the printer which houses its power supply, so the footprint on the desktop is larger than at first appears. Apart from the mains kettle socket, there are connections for USB 2 and parallel cables. At the front, a cover lifts for access to the single-unit developer drum and toner. Maintenance could hardly be simpler.

The printer driver installs easily under Windows and provides the usual functions, such as watermarks, overlays and multi-page-per-sheet printing. The only obvious facility missing is the ability to print on both sides of the paper - duplex print - and this is only available by manually feeding the paper through a second time. Drivers for various incarnations of Linux are provided.

Print speeds are good, with a five-page test piece completing in just under half a minute and a 3 x 5-inch photo taking just over a quarter of a minute. There's quite a warm up time from sleep mode, though, where the first print out will take around 30 seconds longer than this.

The quality of both text and images is very good, with black text being particularly sharp and free of any splatter, while photographic images, usually not a laser printer forté, were still pretty good. All this from a printer which will cost you roughly 1.5p per page to run, which is highly competitive with others in this price range.

This is a well-conceived printer at an economical price. It prints well and reasonably quickly and although it has few of the bells and whistles of more expensive units, such as duplex printing, it does pretty much what it says on the box. That can't be bad for the price.