Product Reviews

Earlier this year Kyocera proudly announced that it had strengthened its number two position in the UK mono laser printer market. That's certainly a commendable achievement, although it will have to work hard to take the top spot away from Hewlett-Packard. Kyocera also deserves credit for being one of the few manufacturers that has always taken a strong environmental stance, with the claim that its printers are constructed almost entirely from recyclable or easily disposable materials.

The FS-680 continues this tradition and complements Kyocera's existing range of personal mono lasers. Its elegant, Porsche-designed chassis fills a small gap between the FS-600 (reviewed issue 38, p176) and the FS-800 (reviewed issue 46, p158). There's actually very little difference between all three models in terms of features. With an 8ppm engine, the FS-680 has the same print speed as the FS-800. It only comes with PCL5e emulation, whereas its bigger brother has PostScript 2 as well, but both have 4Mb of memory integrated on the controller board, along with a 50MHz PowerPC processor. A standard SIMM socket allows the RAM to be upgraded to 36Mb although, as usual, Kyocera charges an arm and a leg for its security-coded modules, with an extra 4Mb costing a hefty £69. That seemed a good idea a few years ago, but 4Mb SIMMs are so cheap now that they're hardly worth five minutes of your average burglar's time.

The FS-680 has an extremely compact footprint, measuring only 225 « 363 « 360mm (H « W « D). Its single, lower paper tray has a 150-sheet capacity, and a small flip-down panel at the front provides a straighter path through the printer for single sheets of heavier media. Capacity can be increased with an optional 250-sheet tray (£99) that fits neatly underneath. Kyocera offers a number of networking options starting with a low-cost external 10BaseT Ethernet printer server (£130), which takes over the parallel port. Alternatively, the spare expansion slot at the rear can be populated with an internal SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) compliant print server card (£249) with 10BaseT and 10Base2 interfaces, or a dual-speed 10/100BaseTX version instead (£275). These come with Kyocera's EcoLINK software allowing the printer to be fully

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managed in a NetWare or Windows NT environment, and a Web browser interface is also provided. Savings can be made by going for the versions with pre-installed options, as the FS-680TN (£639) comes with both paper trays, internal print server card and an extra 4Mb of memory.

The FS-680 uses the same ceramic developer drum as its stable-mates. It's designed to last 100,000 pages - the entire working life of the printer. It also uses the same toner cartridge, and with a lifespan of 3,000 pages at five per cent coverage the result is printing costs of 1p per page. This compares favourably with the competition, although it can't match Kyocera's departmental lasers, which can turn a page out for a mere 0.4p.

Installation is a simple matter of popping the toner cartridge into the drum assembly and leaving Windows 95 or 98 to auto-detect the printer. The PCL driver provides plenty of control over output quality, and you can select a 300 or 600dpi resolution, or use KIR2 (Kyocera Image Refinement) for a simulated 1,200dpi. An ECOPrint option also allows you to reduce toner usage for draft prints. A KPDL driver is included too as standard, but if PostScript 2 support isn't installed in the printer all you'll get are pages of rubbish. That option does bring a few extra features, such as printing multiple pages on a single sheet and remotely controlling the sleep time-out, but at £247 it's expensive. The FS-800 would be a better bet if you need PostScript 2 as it has the upgrade already installed, costs only £31 more and you get a smart LCD panel to play with as well.

For general text printing the FS-680 delivers its quoted 8ppm speed, with a 15-page Word document output in 113 seconds. More complex prints will put the laser under pressure though, as a five-page report with graphs and tables dropped speed to 6.5ppm. This fell further with our standard PC Pro mono laser test. Its 23 pages of heavy formatting, graphics and photographs had the FS-680 struggling at only 4.25ppm.

For a personal laser, the FS-680 produced good-quality output. As you'd expect, text was razor-sharp at 600dpi, and photographic images revealed high levels of detail with none of the banding that was evident with the FS-800. Another bonus is that the 4Mb of memory proved sufficient for printing high-resolution pictures, whereas the FS-800 failed with memory overruns.

On a price comparison, the FS-680 is slightly cheaper than the PC Pro Recommended Samsung 6050 (reviewed issue 57, p153). While both offer similar specifications, the Samsung has an edge on speed - rated at 12ppm. What may swing things Kyocera's way, however, is the Samsung's high printing costs (1.3p per page) and its lack of network upgrade options. If you're on the lookout for an inexpensive workgroup printer, the FS-680 definitely deserves a place on your shortlist.