It had to come. On the one hand you have all-in-one machines, which combine a printer and a scanner to give you copying as well. On the other you have the rapidly dropping price of colour laser printers; around the £200 mark if you shop around. A new breed of colour laser multifunction devices is the result and the Epson's Aculaser CX11N is one of the first to be launched.

The CX11N can't really hide what it is - a colour laser printer with a flatbed scanner on top - but it tries to integrate the two devices. Although the scanner sits quite low over the laser engine, the whole machine is tall, which could make it awkward to use the scanner if set on a desktop. You'd be better off with a printer trolley.

The controls are pretty intuitive, with a five-line, back-lit, alpha-numeric display presenting menu and messages clearly, even under strong overhead light. There are no separate controls for the scanner, which is a straightforward 600dpi unit. This resolution matches the standard output resolution of the printer, though with software enhancement this rises to an effective 2,400dpi.

Setting up and maintaining the printer section of the machine is a bit fiddly, as you have to open covers on top and front to fit the four toner cartridges and developer drum. The Aculaser CX11N uses a carousel-based mechanism, which means each layer of colour is added to the page in turn.

Theoretically, this should make the Aculaser slow to print, but under test we saw very respectable times, with a five-page, black text print finishing in under 25 seconds and a colour text and graphics page taking less than 18 seconds.

Print quality is very good, with black text in particular coming through clear and sharp. You buy a colour laser for colour, though, and here too you won't be disappointed. Colour graphics come through vivid and well-defined and even colour photos are more than passable. They're not up to inkjet standards yet, but are still fine for business use, such as to illustrate marketing fliers.

You'll get 4,000 pages out of a black toner cartridge, but this drops to 1,500 pages when printing colour, so if you use the machine intensively you could be maintaining it regularly, too. Even so, we worked out running costs at just under 2p for a 5 percent cover black page and just over 8p for a 20 percent cover full-colour page. These are good figures when you look at the main competition.

Verdict
This is a good first attempt at a new class of business multifunction machine. There are a couple of little niggles, like the lack of a multi-purpose feed tray and the slightly awkward access to cartridges, but in general the Aculaser CX11N is good value for money and a worthwhile colour workhorse.

Company: Epson

Contact: 0800 220546

Tags: printer laser printer inkjet printer toner cartridge multifunction printer seiko epson hardware toner