As personal colour laser printers go, the Lexmark C510 certainly stands out from the crowd. Although it's at the cheaper end of the scale with a price just above the £200 mark, the C510 has an impressive specification, with a mono speed rating of 30ppm and a colour rating of 8ppm. No doubt this speed is thanks in part to the 500MHz processor backed up by 64MB of RAM, which you can upgrade to 256MB.

Then again, Lexmark supplies starter cartridges that only have a life of 1,500 pages, which realistically means that you'll have to buy replacements after a few months. Although you can buy 3,000-page colour cartridges and a 5,000-page black cartridge for £67 each, we recommend that you choose high-yield consumables instead.

This will give you a black cartridge life of 7,000 pages for a cost of £74 and colour cartridges that last for 5,000 pages and cost £87 each, to give a cost per page around the 6p mark. Despite the low purchase price this is also a reasonably cheap printer to run, which is a refreshing change.

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We mentioned that this is a personal laser printer, and the reason is that it has a USB 2.0 port without either parallel or network connections, so you have to connect the Lexmark directly to your PC or Mac (provided you're running OS X), although there is the outside chance that you may be able to connect it to an office print server or router if you own one which has a USB connection.

The C510 has a fold-down cover on the front which conceals the four toner cartridges, with the pull-out 250-page paper tray at the bottom. Printed output ends up face down on the top of the printer on a shelf which is also rated at 250 pages.

The design is quite conventional so it's no surprise that the C510 is similar in dimensions to many other colour lasers, measuring 495 x 420 x 385mm, but at 30.3kg it's relatively heavy. Overall the build quality seems a bit cheap and cheerful, and the rubber control buttons stood out as objects of unpleasantness on this very large beige box.

Text print quality is good, but then we'd expect that from any laser printer, and it's certainly fast with ten pages taking about 30 seconds from start to finish. But the colour side of things wasn't as good as we would like. There's no problem with the speed, as 8ppm is plenty fast enough for a budget printer, however the quality of the colour was rather grainy and unsatisfactory.

The Lexmark C510 is both cheap and fast but it's not perfect. For one thing you need to decide if the basic look and feel is going to cause you problems, and for another you would be well advised to see a sample of the colour output before you hand over your cash. On balance we'd say that the C510 is a decent budget colour laser printer.