To those used to looking at personal and desktop laser printers, a price of £425 plus VAT for a mono laser printer may seem high. What you pay for in Tally Genicom's 9035 is speed, or at least rated speed. This printer is claimed to print 34ppm (pages per minute) on A4 pages, in draft mode. That's around twice as fast as a typical single-user printer and gives some idea of where this machine is aimed.

This is a genuine workgroup printer, designed from the outset to be networked among a group of people in an office. With this kind of throughput, the printer can handle jobs from a number of sources simultaneously and you would still expect few unforced cups of coffee while waiting for jobs to finish.

As further evidence of its high duty cycle, the printer is supplied as standard with two paper trays. The lower of these can take up to 550 sheets of 60gsm paper and the upper, designed for special media or letterheads, can take a further 150 sheets. There's a good, deep output tray on the printer's top surface, too, so there's plenty of room for completed print jobs.

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A simple, two-line status display is coupled to a control panel with the near-standard diamond of four buttons, plus others for more specialist functions. The button diamond is used to navigate the printer's menu system, but on this machine you move through menu options on the same level with the up and down keys and move up and down through the hierarchy with the left and right keys. This is a little illogical and takes some learning for those used to most other makes of printer.

At the back of the 9035 are sockets for USB 2 and parallel cables and for Ethernet networking. The machine is easy to set up and configure, as its only consumable is a drum and toner cartridge, rated at 17,000 pages, which drops in through a hatch in the machine's top cover.

Cost of ownership is made up from these cartridges and the occasional maintenance kit, comprising a fuser unit and feed roller, which you need to fit every 200,000 pages. The total service life of the printer is a cool one million sheets. The cost per page works out at just under 1.75p per page, which is very economical.

Print quality is well up to scratch, with good, dense text and reasonable shading in greyscale images, although we did notice some banding in large areas of tone. While the printer didn't reach its quoted speed in our real-world tests (few printers do), it certainly throws out the pages at a decent rate.

The 9035 is a good, serviceable, workgroup printer, capable of handling many thousands of pages per month and of working with a number of different users at the same time. While its rated speed is a little optimistic, it's still a fast machine and is cheap and easy to maintain.