OK, so you've been using an inkjet printer for years, but lately you seem to be buying replacement cartridges every 5 minutes. This could be because the cartridges in nearly all current ink printers have a much smaller capacity than used to be the case a couple of years ago, or maybe you are busier and just print more.

Either way it could be time to step up to your first laser printer, but which one do you buy?

Most of your printing will probably be text, so a mono laser printer will give you the benefits of lower printing costs, faster output and a more professional appearance to your documents. Hang onto your colour inkjet printer though for the odd colour job and for printing photographs.

Whilst ink cartridges have reduced in capacity dramatically, the same in not generally true of toner cartridges, for example toner cartridgesfor the HP Laserjet 1022 yielding 2,000 pages are little more expensive than HP ink cartridgesfor many models

I have taken one printer costing under £100 from each of the main manufacturers, Brother, Canon, Hewlett Packard, Lexmark and Samsung.

The models examined are the Brother HL-2040 , Canon i-Sensys LBP2900, HP Laserjet 1022, Lexmark E-120 and from Samsung, the ML-2010 all of which are readily available on-line for under £100. In fact the Canon and Samsung printers can be found with a little searching for almost half this target price making them laser bargains.

The Canon LBP2900 may be available for a bargain price but regrettably there are a few areas where it does not compete well with the opposition.

The first is print speed, 12ppm is not really an acceptable speed for a modern laser printer, especially when even at this level, all other printers in the group achieve speeds between 18 and 20 ppm. Other shortfalls are a lack of memory, 2mb as opposed to 8mb available from all the other manufactures and a small input tray holding only 150 sheets of A4. This feature is also shared by the Lexmark and Samsung printers, there is nothing worse on a large print run than continually having to refill the input tray. So although the Canon is at the cheap end of the spectrum it is the first to be eliminated in this comparison.

One of the major reasons to convert to a laser printer is to achieve savings in terms of cost per page, on examining the cost of printing a standard A4 page at 5% coverage all of these printers with one exception return figures less than 2p per page. The exception is of course the Lexmark E-120 which is 50% more expensive to run than any of the other brands. Lexmark continue to produce both ink and toner printers that are considerably more expensive in whole life terms than any other manufacturer and to add insult to injury ship this printer with a starter cartridge capable of producing only 1,000 prints.

And whatever you do, do not buy a Dell printer as these are inevitably re badged and re chipped Lexmark’s and are even more expensive to run as Dell attempt to limit the supply of cartridges to make you purchase from them at full price.

I digress, back to our group test, which now has three printers remaining.

At first glance the Brother HL-2040 would appear to be the most cost effective of this group, replacement toner cartridges are the cheapest and last for 2,500pages, 500 more than cartridges for the HP printer. However Brother is the only manufacturer here not to use a one piece replacement cartridge and so the cost of replacing the drum unit has also to be taken into consideration and when this is done the cost per page rises to match the figure of HP. The use of a separate drum and toner combination in my experience also leads to a less reliable print mechanism and past performance of this type of Brother printer has been fragile, for this reason alone I would eliminate the Hl-2040.

This leaves the HP and the bargain basement Samsung to fight it out for the honour of best buy.

The Samsung ML-2010 is not only cheaper to buy but also marginally cheaper to run and with cartridges lasting 3,000 pages, replacement is required less frequently. Be warned though that the starter cartridge supplied with the printer will only last for some 1,000pages. The downsides of this printer are the small input tray which only holds 150 sheets as opposed to 250 in the HP and the print resolution is no match for Hp's 1200x1200 dpi.

Faced with just this dilemma last month for our office, I purchased the HP Laserjet 1022 and have not regretted the decision. We have run several HP laser printers over the years and found them to be very tough, reliable workhorses. In fact we still have a 12 year old HP printer in service today that has only received replacement cartridges and a set of pickup rollers. In the end the larger capacity input tray and our positive history with HP printers won the day.

If however you are on a really tight budget, the Samsung is a good inexpensive option. Samsung are a relative newcomer to the printer market but with aggressive pricing and little negative feedback will soon be a force to be reckoned with.