Samsung's SCX-4200 is an unusual beast; a multifunction device based around a mono laser engine, rather than a colour inkjet. It's intended for home office or small office use, where colour output isn't as important as low running costs and speedy print.

The machine is compact and squat, with a footprint not much larger than an A4 sheet. It's conventionally designed, with a 250-sheet paper tray at the bottom of its front panel, a multi-purpose, single sheet feed slot just above and a paper output slot above that. At the top of the machine is the flatbed scanner, which can take paper up to A4 in size.

In front of the scanner is a simple but effective control panel, comprising a two-line, 16-character LCD display and a row of buttons, for navigating the menu system and starting scan and copy jobs. At the back there's a single USB 2 socket for connection to a PC; there's no network option on the SCX-4200.

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Pull down the front cover and you have access to the integrated drum and toner cartridge. The standard consumable prints around 3,000 pages at five percent cover, but, to keep the price down, Samsung provides a 1,000 page 'starter' cartridge with a new SCX-4200. A standard cartridge costs around £50, so print costs come out at about 0.2p per page, which is good for a comparatively low-priced laser mechanism.

Most print output is good quality, with text being sharp and clear and business graphics coming out smooth and well textured, with little banding apparent in filled areas. It even does a reasonable job of reproducing photographs, not something you would normally buy a mono laser printer for.

The only negative is its inability to reproduce business graphics when copied from the scanner. Despite making several adjustments to the copy mode and darkness setting, we couldn't get a satisfactory copy from this type of original.

Print speeds depend on whether the laser engine and scanner lamp have had a chance to warm up. Once they have, both copies and prints are respectably quick, but the warm-up time can be over 30 seconds, so if you use the machine intermittently, it can be slow.

Samsung provides a good software bundle with the SCX-4200, which includes ReadIris OCR and a document management application called SmarThru. This can be used to supervise most printing, scanning and copying tasks.

The SCX-4200 is a handy little device for all kinds of office work, though two shortcomings prevent it being given a full recommendation. The warm-up time, particularly for the laser engine, is a hindrance if you print intermittently and the copy quality for greyscale tints isn't what it should be.