All the main consumer printer manufacturers produce a low-cost colour laser and HP's cheapest offering for Mac users is the Color LaserJet CP1515n. It's designed for the home or small office and is network-ready, as well as having a standard USB interface. It has a comparatively large footprint, but sits quite low on the desk for a colour laser.

Decked out in two-tone grey, the printer has simple, cuboid lines, broken up by the large radius curve to its front edge, into which a small control panel is set on the right side. This consists of a two-line by 16-character LCD display, two status LEDs and five buttons for operating the control menus and stopping a current job. The LCD panel is quite deep set with a shiny acrylic cover, making it awkward to read under overhead lighting.

A single, 150-sheet paper tray is located at the bottom of the front panel, with a single-sheet, special-media slot directly above. There's a small panel around this slot that lifts up and locks, so you can get your hand in to release any paper jams. The system appears to be quite effective, although we experienced no jams during testing.

At the back are sockets for USB and Ethernet networking, and connection to a Mac is very straightforward, as is the installation of the printer drivers, although you may have to add the printer manually to the list of available devices under Print and Fax.

The Color LaserJet CP1515n is a simple machine, but has the advantage of using an inline laser mechanism, which is both easy to maintain and quicker than the older carousel-style engines, which have been largely superseded even in budget printers.

The main advantage of a colour laser printer over a colour inkjet is in the printing process itself. Laser print is a dry technology, where the toner powder is rolled and heated, so it sticks to the paper, rather than being sprayed wet, as with inkjet ink, onto each sheet. This should result in sharper, better-defined characters and smoother, brighter colours. That's certainly true here. In our tests, black text was well defined and free of any toner spatter, and characters from the 600dpi engine were well formed and showed no signs of jagged edges.

The same was true of colours in business graphics, with smooth and regular colour fills giving bright, attractive highlights to pages. Black text registration over colour was very good, with no signs of haloing and reversed text, white on black, was fully formed with no broken ascenders or descenders.

Photographic prints didn't suffer from the over-vivid colours we often see from colour lasers. In fact, if anything, they had a slightly dowdy, over-dark appearance. Quite a lot of detail in the darker areas of images was lost to black, and you may need to resort to software to achieve more natural colours.

HP claims speeds of 12 pages per minute (ppm) for black print and 8ppm for colour, but in our real-world tests, we saw around half these speeds. Our 10-page black text document took one minute 44 seconds to complete, giving a speed of 5.77ppm, and the five-page black text and colour graphics test took one minute six seconds, equivalent to 4.55ppm. Neither of these speeds is particularly impressive and are easily matched by inkjet machines costing a lot less.

The CP1515n uses four combined drum and toner cartridges that are very easy to set once you've pulled down the front cover and slid out the single tray that contains them all. Cartridges are only available in a single capacity - 1400 pages for colour ones and 2200 pages for black. At typical Internet prices, this works out at 2.3p for ISO black pages and 13.2p for ISO colour ones. The black print cost is pretty much in the centre of the field for machines in this price bracket, but the colour cost is a bit high, with some printers and all-in-ones offering similar pages for a couple of pence per page less.