The LBP-810 is a neat, upright printer, taller than most but with a smaller footprint, too. It takes paper from a 150-sheet bin at the back and feeds to another directly in front. There's a single sheet feeder, too, which can be adjusted for envelopes and other special papers.

There are no controls on the printer, apart from a toggle which directs paper to the output bin or face-up onto your desk. There's only one indicator, too, a big green light which indicates power and printing status.

Control comes from the CAPT utility, which runs under every version of Windows except XP. Even here, though, you can use the Windows 2000 driver and a dedicated XP version should be out by early April.

The LBP-810 is quiet and efficient, printing text pages on our tests at around 6.5ppm. That's not quite up to the 8ppm quoted, but our results allow for transmission of the first page, rather than starting from the first paper sheet fed to the printer. Graphics prints were also commendably quick for a personal printer. Print quality was good, with only slight banding on the background of our bitmap sample and a little break-up on the tone bands on the vector print.

Print costs are reasonable at 2.2p per page, based on Canon's toner life and costing figures. With dual inputs for USB and parallel connection on the back panel, this is an easy printer to set up and use. It's an inexpensive purchase and running costs are close to those of its main rivals.