Despite the current push for sub-£1,000 A4 colour laser printers, these products tend to cut too many corners in the specification. Panasonic's KX-CL500 provides a more realistic starting point with plenty of memory, decent paper capacity and a network interface at an equally realistic price.

The basic unit appears to be a plain cube with a 530-sheet paper input cassette at the bottom. The front panel of this cassette hinges open and telescopes out to form a multipurpose tray. It's a bit fiddly and flimsy but it works, and is big enough to hold up to 250 sheets.

Toners and drums are separate replaceable items. The imaging drums (one for black and a special triple-drum unit for colour) are installed with some effort on the right-hand side of the printer. In sharp contrast, the toner cartridges are easily slotted in under a flap on top of the unit - anyone could do it. The cartridges are big for such a small A4 printer, keeping running costs down to around 5p per sheet.

Print speed is impressive at around 15 pages per minute (ppm) for black and 13.6ppm for colour. This doesn't come close to the official rating, but is good. Sheets are printed in one pass, hence the fast colour output performance. Output quality is good and comparable with other colour lasers, but the printing process itself is much quieter.

A 10/100 Base Tx network interface comes as standard and network functions are well implemented via an embedded web server, so you can manage the printer remotely using a web browser, and using the on-printer menus was just as easy.

The best part of this purchase is that you get two years' worth of black toner for free. Obviously, we would have preferred colour cartridges, but this still represents a huge saving.

Contact: Panasonic 08700 100 464
www.panasonic.co.uk

Specifications:

• Colour laser
• 530-sheet input tray, 100-sheet multipurpose tray, 250-sheet output
• 20ppm black, 16ppm colour
• 1,200 x 1,200dpi
• 64MB memory
• USB1.1, parallel, 10/100 Base Tx Ethernet
• 419 x 536 x 395mm (w x d x h)
• 30kg
• Black cartridge £34.83, CMY £81.08