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Reviewing an All-in-One with all the bells and whistles is a comparatively easy task, because there's a lot to look at and evaluate. A single-function, mono laser printer, like the LaserJet P2014, is a much simpler and potentially more reliable beast, which is one of the reasons for buying one. It prints black text and graphics for correspondence and office documents and there are only three main things to check: the quality of the pages it prints, the speed at which it produces them and how much they cost.

The HP LaserJet P2014 is a fairly square-cut, cream cube, with its vertical edges rounded off. At the front is a black-faced, 250-sheet paper tray and a pull-down cover for access to the single-piece drum and toner cartridge. Directly above the main paper tray is a 50-sheet multi-function feed, too.

Set into the top panel on the right-hand side are six indicators and two control buttons. The buttons are for Start and Cancel, while the indicators shows status conditions, such as paper jams, low toner, low paper or general error conditions. At the back is another pull-down cover so you can get to paper jams and on the back left-hand side are sockets for USB 2.0 and parallel connections. This printer has no Wi-Fi or facility for an internal network card, though you can connect a general-purpose JetDirect adapter externally for cabled or wireless networking.

The setup software includes an animated run through of the physical installation of the printer, which is mainly down to removing packing pieces and tapes. The drum and toner cartridge is supplied in situ, but you have to remove it to pull off covers and release the toner. The supplied cartridge is good for around 3,000 text pages.

There's little software other than the driver and this is fairly basic. There's no duplex facility on the machine, so the main software options are multi-page prints, watermarks - though no overprints - and resolution selection. The three print quality options are 600dpi, FastRes 1200 (emulated 1200 dpi) and ProRes 1200, progressively better and better. Selections are obvious and the layout of the driver is conventional and easy to work your way around.

HP claims the LaserJet P2014 can print up to 23 pages per minute and our five-page text document completed in 18 seconds, which equates to 17ppm. Considering this includes processing and rasterising time, which most printer manufacturers don't include in their print speed figures and we do, 17ppm is pretty good. There's very little warm-up time to this printer, which starts printing quickly, even when it's been asleep for a while.