Product Reviews

If you're in the market for a personal mono laser printer, Kyocera Mita may not be the first name to spring to mind. This is a company that sells big, ultra-reliable printers to the business market, but it has recently revamped it's entry-level mono laser offering and introduced the FS-1100.

This squat, functionally-designed printer is designed for day-to-day business printing and has good eco-credentials for its low consumable count.

The standard PC beige is highlighted on the FS-1100 with a dark, slate grey top and front. A circular status display ring on the top of the printer features green and orange LEDs, to indicate low paper, low toner, paper jams and other warning conditions. There's also a small triangular window in the middle of the output tray paper stop, which shows the part number printed on the top of the toner cartridge inside the printer.

While it's useful to know this number, it's hardly something you need to see on a daily basis, as the cartridge is rated at 4000 pages. It would be more useful if Kyocera Mita could contrive a way to indicate the remaining toner level in the window.

The main paper feed tray holds up to 250 sheets and there's a single sheet, multi-purpose feed slot directly above this. This can be used to feed letterheads, envelopes or other oddly sized media. A single USB socket at the back of the printer is the only connection possible, though a network adaptor is available as an option, as is a second, 250-sheet paper tray and memory to supplement the supplied 32MB.

Physical setup is straightforward, as the printer only requires a toner cartridge to get it running. Kyocera Mita uses a patented coating for its photoconductor drum, which lasts the lifetime of the printer and needs no

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replacement. When you first insert a toner cartridge, the printer runs through a one-off, five-minute charging cycle.

Kyocera Mita's Mac OS X driver comes on a supplied CD, but a Leopard-specific driver is available from its website. The driver includes emulations of both PostScript Level III and PCL6, as well as Kyocera's own Prescribe page description language.

As with most printer makers, stated print speeds are over stated. Kyocera Mita quotes print speeds of up to 28ppm, but even if you assume these are for draft print and exclude the time for rasterising each page, they're still optimistic. Our five-page text document printed in draft mode still only achieved 24ppm. In normal print mode, which most people use most of the time, you're likely to see about 15ppm.

This is still quite acceptable for a personal laser printer, of course, and print quality is more than acceptable. Text print is densely black and shows little sign of toner spatter or jagged edges to diagonals or curves. This is mainly due to the printer's default resolution of 1200dpi.

Greyscale tones are also smooth and well differentiated, tint-to-tint. There's some slight banding, but output is generally better than most of its competition. Photographic output benefits from these smooth greyscales and detail in darker areas of photos, which is often lost with a mono laser, stands up well. While you're never going to get the range of greys of a good inkjet printer, the images produced are perfectly acceptable for internal use, while text print is fine for customers, too.

The print cost per page of the FS-1100 is simply its toner cartridge cost divided by the number of pages it can produce. Kyocera Mita quotes 4000 pages, which results in a cost of just 1p per page. This is quite a bit lower than most of its competitors and with a low wastage of consumables, you should also make savings through low maintenance. The company claims you can 'install it and simply forget about it', and that seems about right.

While there isn't anything revolutionary about the FS-1100, it lives up to the company's reputation for reliable business printers. Low running costs and above-average print quality make it an attractive proposition. It may not be as fast as the spec sheet suggests, but for personal printing, it's unlikely to leave you hanging about.