24 Kyocera Ecosys P5026cdn/ Epson Ecotank ET-2600

Two printers that take their time

This is one of the more compact colour laser printers, but has a full 250-sheet A4 tray plus a 50-sheet multi-purpose feed. It’s not a scanner, copier or fax, and there’s no Wi-fi, just USB 2.0 and Gigabit Ethernet to connect to a PC or network. Neither the tiny LCD screen nor the printed Quick Start Guide are helpful, but it doesn’t matter because everything can be set up using Kyocera’s software, including duplex (printing both sides). Although the P5026cdn lacks Wi-fi, it works with phones and tablets once it’s connected to a network with wireless access, which you could achieve by cabling it to your broadband router.

Text looked crisp, although it could have been a little blacker on the default setting, and colour business graphics were solid and vibrant. Photos didn’t look great, but few colour laser printers excel here. At 16.4 pages per minute (ppm) in black or 10ppm in colour, this isn’t an especially fast printer for its price bracket, but if speed isn’t your priority you might like the Quiet mode, which slows it even further to avoid noise. It’s still faster than most inkjets.

Running costs work out at about 7.6p per colour page and 1.3p for mono, and you can save more using the Eco mode, which came out noticeably faint. Those are reasonable costs, but a full set of toners adds up to over £250. Unless you really need the volume, speed and solid colours of an office laser printer, an inkjet will be the better choice for most users.