Price aside, the most surprising thing about the Aculaser C1000 is that Epson has managed to fit the workings of a colour laser printer inside such a small box.

In terms of usability we have no complaints. Open up the top and you'll see that all the bits you can safely touch have been moulded from green plastic.

Pull down a side panel and you'll find the four individual toner cartridges, each of which can be ejected by pulling a large green lever and swapped in seconds.

Print quality is excellent. Character edges are sharp, right down to 6pt size, and legible even at 4pt, if your eyes are up to the job. The printer churned out our standard 50-page text document in two minutes, 55 seconds which was, quite surprisingly, two seconds longer than it took to print a 50-page mixture of graphics and text.

The C1000 has a native resolution of 600 x 600dpi but uses a technology very similar to that used to vary the size of droplets in an inkjet, and so can emulate 2,400dpi.

As a result, our test photo - although nothing like inkjet quality - was very impressive. Tonal transitions were not particularly subtle, and there was an overall metallic sheen, but for use in a business environment, proofing colour documents or producing short-run fliers, it is more than up to the job. It also prints to within 5mm of each edge on A4 pages.

PC and Mac compatible, it features a 500-sheet paper tray and 16Mb of memory. Optional extras include double-sided printing, extra paper trays, stapling units and memory modules that increase the quota from 16Mb to 256Mb. Small offices can install a network card if they'd rather not use the integrated parallel and USB ports.

PRICE: £1,056.33 (£899 ex VAT); black cartridge £51.89 (£44.16 ex VAT); colour cartridge £100.82 (£85.80 ex VAT)

CONTACT: Epson 0800 220 546
www.epson.co.uk