Lexmark's baby personal printer is a variant of Samsung's smallest laser, the ML-1250. It has a neat footprint, thanks to the adoption of the near-vertical paper input and output trays. Paper feeds from the rear of the printer - there's a single sheet feeder for non-standard papers in front of the main feed bin - to an output bin at the front.

The E210 has better physical control than most of the other printers in the group, with buttons for printing a sheet at a time from the manual feeder, for cancelling a print job part-way through a run and for printing a demo page - it seems excessive to devote a button to this function alone.

Software control comes from Lexmark's excellent software driver and the networking printer manager, MarkVision. You can connect the E210 through a parallel or USB connection and driver installation is straightforward.

Print quality is generally good, with clean black text and well-defined graphics. Default settings produce light bitmap and vector images, but they're well detailed and you can adjust for darker prints.

Paper handling is not so hot, with quite a bit of paper curl on 80gsm sheets. Try to print double-sided, by manually running the paper through a second time, and you risk the corners being folded over and resultant paper jams. This is also true of the £250 Samsung ML-1250 on which the E-210 is based, though.

Running costs for the E-210 come down to the cost of the combined toner and drum cartridge, which at over £76 for 2,000 sheets gives an expensive 3.8p per page. You could try sneakily using a Samsung cartridge, which at £57.58 for 2,500 sheets reduces this to 2.3p per page.