Samsung has a good range of monochrome and colour laser printers, which sell well because of their good price/performance ratios. This latest CLP-510 colour laser is aimed at the personal market, but can be expanded into a small workgroup machine by adding an extra 500-sheet paper tray to the existing 250-sheet one and fitting an optional Ethernet or Ethernet and wireless adapter.

This is a big printer, looking more like a desktop photocopier, and it sits sideways on the desk. You load paper from the front, but it runs through the printer from left to right, ejecting to a tray set into its top cover. A multi-purpose tray, which can take up to 100 sheets, folds down from the right-hand side of the machine.

A single-line LCD display, which would benefit from a backlight, is supported by a small diagram of the mechanism with LEDs strategically placed to indicate possible paper-jam positions. We didn't see any jams during testing.

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Set up isn't that straightforward, as you have to insert the four toner cartridges, transfer belt, fuser unit and waste toner bottle all separately, and most have different life-cycles. The top and side covers interlock, so you have to open them in order. Samsung supplies either standard or high-yield toner cartridges, rated at 2,000 and 5,000 pages at 20 percent cover respectively (3,000 and 7,000 pages for black). The transfer belt and imaging unit last for 12,500 pages each, when printing in colour.

With the cost of a 5 percent black text page coming out at 1.9p and a 20 percent colour one at just under 8p, this machine isn't going to print you out of house and home, but it will produce your prints quickly. Our tests saw a five-page, monochrome text document complete in 26 seconds and a colour text and graphics page in less than that. Even a 20-page, duplex document took under two minutes.

Print quality of these 600dpi (1200dpi with software print enhancement) pages was a little mixed, with black text having a vaguely anti-aliased look; a bit fuzzy around the edges. Colours came out a little too vivid for photos, though they're fine for business graphics like PowerPoint presentations.

Colour laser printers can be notoriously noisy, but the CLP-510 scrapes in at under 50dBA. While not quiet in the sense of an inkjet or even a mono laser, it's one of the best in its class and shouldn't cause much distraction in a typical working office.

Under £250 is a very good price for a colour laser printer with this feature set. It's not often you get duplex printing built-in, in-line rather than carousel printing or even a multipurpose tray at this price-point. The unit cost of consumables appears high, but the overall cost per page is, in fact, quite low, making the CLP-510 good value for money overall.