Although there are cheaper home inkjet multifunctions, the Kodak EasyShare ESP 5 provides a decent all-round experience for its price. Its focus on print and scan quality allows for good results, particularly with photos.

Getting the highest print quality out of the 5300 costs about 30 cents per photo, which is a pretty good result. And those ink prices may be hard to pass up.

Great for personal use, this low-price colour laser printer produces attractive colour documents.

The bizhub c200 feels like it was cobbled together out of spare parts, and gives the feel of an unfinished multifunction which never made it past primary testing. With slow printing at low quality and an unusable Web interface, this machine just isn’t sufficient to meet the needs of a medium-sized business.

Konica Minolta’s bizhub 501 provides adequate functionality for the medium-sized office with fast print speeds and decent remote administration capability. This multifunction is let down by mono scanning, however.

There is little difference in functionality or capability between the bizhub 421 and 501, so the price difference clearly favours the bizhub 421. Unless every ounce of performance matters, the bizhub 421 is a more reasonable purchase.

Konica Minolta appears to have fixed the problem with sluggishness that plagued our 5430DL test unit. However, the 5440DL's 14.7 pages per minute for text and 4.5ppm for colour still lag behind colour lasers that have a similar price and comparable paper capacity.

This is the lowest-priced colour laser we've seen -- and it offers top-notch print quality. Its only downfall is the cost of a networking adapter.

While this unit has plenty of great features, we were disappointed by its print and photocopy quality. Photo printing may require a little fiddling in an image editor beforehand to get the colour balance correct.

Neither of the new Lexmark wireless multifunction printers is cheap, but the wireless features are well worth looking into. Add to that great ease of use and very competent print quality, and the X4850 is a very decent model for photo enthusiasts.

The Lexmark X6570 isn't particularly cheap, and there is obviously the question of whether the text output would really be good enough for business work -- in many cases, a cheap mono laser would be a better bet. However, you do get good fax facilities and colour printing, and if the wireless facilities are of interest then this makes a very decent buy.