The race is on for the title of cheapest entry-level colour laser printer for business, and Epson is one of the front runners.

The Aculaser C900 looks and feels like a heavyweight, but costs just under £750 - a lot less than many mono network office lasers (see below).

Being this inexpensive means you have to sacrifice many features, though Epson has built this printer big with an eye on upgrade options.

It's physically quite a large machine when compared to some of the compact models hitting the market, and can be complemented with an optional duplexer and 500-sheet tray.

You will probably need the extra tray sooner rather than later, along with that network interface, because all you get at the starting price is USB and parallel connections and a 200-sheet multipurpose tray.

Even the basic 16MB memory provision is likely to be a problem, judging by the frequency of 'low memory' warnings we received throughout our testing.

As usual with large printers, replacing the consumables is fussy, made all the more fiddly by the carousel style of loading.

The carousel has another more significant drawback: colour printing is very slow.

So while 20 sheets of black text could be output in less than one and a half minutes, the same 20 sheets in four primary colours took well over five minutes.

We could print from an inkjet faster than this.

Graphics and photo output is much faster than any inkjet, and pretty good quality too.

This helps make up for some poor text quality at small type sizes (under 6pt), where characters began to break up.

Ultimately, this would be a much better purchase with more memory and the 500-sheet feeder added, but then you'd lose that compelling price.

SPECS

• 200-sheet laser
• 4ppm colour, 16ppm black
• 16MB memory
• 600 x 600dpi
• 4 cartridges
• 429 x 406 x 521 mm (w x d x h)
• Parallel and USB interfaces
• 29kg
• Upgrade options: duplexer, 500-sheet feeder, 144MB memory
• Network interface

DETAILS
Price:

£746.13 (£635 ex VAT)
Contact: Epson 0800 220 546
www.epson.co.uk