Kyocera's offering in the personal laser category hasn't quite caught up with the trends in this market area. It has no USB port, for example, only a parallel one. It has a big footprint and styling which is, at the most polite, boxy. The price is high for a personal printer, too, the most expensive here by a full £70.

It's not all bad news, though. There's a high capacity 250-sheet feed tray nestled in neatly under the body of the printer. Paper feeds forward from the tray inside the printer through a figure 'S' path to emerge at the back of the printer's top surface. As well as the internal tray, a multi-purpose tray unfolds from the front of the FS-1000+ and this can take multiple sheets of special media, such as letterheads or envelopes.

A couple of control buttons and a convenient set of five indicators show when paper or toner are low or when there's a paper jam. The Windows driver takes care of everything else and does a very reasonable job, though the remote control panel software caused a blue-screen under Windows ME.

The FS-1000+ uses Kyocera's EcoSys system, which means it has a lifetime drum, rated at 100,000 pages. You only pay for toner and then only every 6,000 pages or so, so print costs come out at a very frugal 1.1p.

Print quality on text is clear and dark, though there are some slight fluctuations in what should be smooth areas of tone in photographic prints. The vector print sample is detailed, though a little dark by default.