Canon iSENSYS LBP5050 review

The LBP5050 has an ingenious design - pop open the front and the toner cartridges slide smoothly out on a spring-loaded drawer.

It's this clever kind of design touch that allows the LBP5050 to be one of the smallest and cheapest printers in the group. At just £128, it's the second cheapest. That compact design is due, in part, to the fact that the LBP5050 has all-in-one toner cartridges. Every other printer here has an image drum that will eventually need replacing - the Canon builds it in to the cartridges. Disappointingly, though, this doesn't mean correspondingly reduced costs per page.

Surprisingly for the price, it's an excellent performer. Canon claims print speeds of 12ppm and 8ppm for black-and-white and colour prints respectively, and we were surprised when the LBP5050 beat both of those claims by a page per minute. The drawback was the time to the first page, the longest of any printer here at 26 seconds for a black-and-white page and more than half a minute for a colour one.

The quality of our tests was generally excellent. For business graphs, the LBP5050 is excellent, although it stumbled on our A4 colour photo. Colours were otherwise bold and accurate and, importantly for any busy office, they emerged at a rate not far off those of black-and-white prints.

So why shouldn't you buy it? It's by no means a bad printer: its size, price and competitive colour printing speeds all make it tempting. However, the Samsung CLP-315 offers such a small number of compromises, so it clearly the better buy. It's very nearly as good when it comes to quality, and although it wasn't as fast printing in colour, it's significantly quicker when asked to produce black-and-white pages. And, significantly for a printer that won't be used as the cornerstone of a busy workgroup, it's worth bearing in mind that the Samsung model is the smaller of the two - the LBP5050 is longer, which will make it harder to slot into a cramped space. The LBP5050 is an excellent printer, but unless the price drops, it's not a winner here.