They may not be the cheapest printers around, but HP's Color Laserjets certainly deliver in terms of value for money.

That's particularly true of the new CP3505x, which replaces the ageing 3800, and which we found to be an exceptionally good choice for the small business looking for an effective, yet affordable, colour printing solution.

Powered by a single-pass A4 colour laser, the CP3505x is unusual in that it can print in colour at the same speed as black and white - up to 21 pages per minute (ppm). It's also quick off the mark with the first page appearing in 12 to 14 seconds in our tests, no matter how complex the document.

It's a level of performance that can be attributed to a 450MHz Motorola Coldfire V5x processor supported by 384MB of memory, which can be further expanded to 1Gb using industry standard Dimms, if needed.

We were also impressed with the quality of the output, both when churning out typical business documents and printing photographs. OK, it won't win many converts among graphics professionals, but for proofing work and as a general-purpose workhorse it's hard to beat.

We also didn't have to mess with any of the settings to get good results. It's got plenty of capacity, with two A4 paper drawers as standard on this model, one holding up to 250 sheets and the other 500. These are accompanied by the usual fold-out multipurpose feeder, although this can only take 10 envelopes at a time, so if you need to print lots of mail-outs, a laser with a proper envelope feeder would be a better bet.

Similarly, if you want to sort, staple or finish documents you'll have to look at other models as these options aren't available on the CP3505x.

On the plus side the maximum duty cycle is 65,000 pages per month with a recommended monthly volume of up to 5,000 pages, enabling the printer to cope with the demands of most small businesses.

A duplexer, for double-sided printing, is built in and a set of full-size (up to 6,000 pages) cartridges is included with the printer. These were very easy to change - sliding into place behind the fold-down door at the front - with replacements available at around £78 (ex Vat) for black and £101 ex Vat for each of the colours.

We also found the CP3505x very easy to set up. An Ethernet network interface comes as standard, together with a built-in print server, enabling the HP laser to be shared on a variety of networks, not just Windows. A PCL6 driver is installed when you run the setup wizard but a Postscript driver is available if preferred, together with support for the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) and direct printing of PDF documents.

Apple Mac and Linux drivers can be downloaded too and the CP3505s can be used with HP's universal print driver on Windows Vista clients.

In terms of size it's not the smallest colour printer on the market, but the CP3505x is still pretty compact with a small, but surprisingly, informative LCD screen for local walk-up management. A web-based interface is, naturally, built in, and the printer can also be managed using an SNMP console, such as HP's Web Jet Admin product, available separately.

At less than £400 ex Vat the CP3505x really is remarkably good value. If you don't need all the features or capacity, there are also cheaper models based on the same engine.