Product Reviews

Over the past few years Kyocera has earned a well-deserved reputation for delivering quality mono laser printers to both the single-user and workgroup markets. Features that have always made its Ecosys printers stand out from the crowd are a low environmental impact and unbeatable printing costs.

The FS-3750 continues this tradition and brings a batch of modest but welcome improvements to Kyocera's ageing FS-3700 (reviewed issue 29, p154). Print speed still remains at 18ppm but the top true resolution has been increased to 1,200dpi, while processing power is upped from a meagre 33MHz to a 166MHz PowerPC chip. PCL5, PCL6 and PostScript 2 emulations are standard and memory is now a more useful 16Mb. This can be expanded to 64Mb, but you'll want to use industry-standard SIMMs as Kyocera will relieve you of £100 for a 16Mb module. It also offers security-coded modules but, at £179 for 16Mb, it's hardly worth bothering.

The FS-3750 uses the same compact chassis as its predecessor, which measures a modest 373 x 310 x 383mm (W x H x D) and weighs only 14kg. Standard paper capacity from the single lower tray is 250 sheets of A4, while a multipurpose tray at the front has room for another 100 sheets. Capacity can be increased significantly with two additional 500-sheet base feeders or you can add a 2,000-sheet motorised feeder. The printer has both top and rear output bins that can be selected from the front panel or printer driver, and the rear stacker tray will increase depth by a further 310mm. You can add a 1,500-sheet document stacker or 15-tray sorter/collator/mailbox as well, although at £1,469 the latter is an expensive option. A duplex unit for double-sided printing is also available, and a small slot on the right-hand side of the chassis allows Flash memory PC Cards to be used for storing fonts, forms and logos locally so they can be accessed faster.

In keeping with all of Kyocera's mono lasers, the FS-3750 uses a ceramic developer drum that is designed to last the entire working life of the printer - in this case 300,000 pages. Low printing costs are achieved as the toner cartridge (£60) is the only consumable and, lasting for 20,000 pages, delivers running

ADVERTISEMENT

costs of only 0.3p per page. It's well worth taking this into account when purchasing a laser as big savings can be made over a number of years. Take Samsung's 16ppm ML-7000N (reviewed issue 56, p166) for example. Push 300,000 pages through it and your running costs, excluding paper, work out to a tidy £3,000. Do the same on the FS-3750 and it will cost you only £900. With TCO (total cost of ownership) such a hot topic these days the low running costs of the FS-3750 are hard to ignore.

Print speeds will vary depending on the resolution selected. Kyocera quotes 18ppm only for 600dpi resolutions, while moving up to 1,200dpi will halve print speed. There's also a Fast 1200 mode that uses KIR2 (Kyocera image enhancement) at 600dpi to speed things up. For general text printing, we found the FS-3750 easily delivered the quoted speeds, with a simple 15-page document completed in 49 seconds at a shade over 18ppm. Our heavily formatted 23-page test document containing large graphics and photographs usually causes a few problems, but this only dropped speed down to 14.5ppm. At 1,200dpi, speed slowed significantly with the same documents completed at 8ppm and 4.5ppm respectively.

Text quality at 600dpi is easily good enough for most users with even the smallest fonts razor sharp, but you'll be hard pushed to spot any improvements at 1,200dpi. Graphics quality is much better than the FS-3700, which was criticised for its poor levels of detail and excessive banding. The FS-3750 produced good levels of detail and smooth greyscales, while banding was kept to an absolute minimum. As with text output, we could see very little difference between 600 and 1,200dpi, although the PostScript 2 driver did produce noticeably better results than the PCL driver.

The printer comes with a Type B parallel port and serial port for local connection, or you can add the optional EcoLink network print server card in the single expansion slot at the rear. The FS-3750T does come with this as standard and you'll save £49 in the process. Previous experience with the EcoLink cards has shown them to be easy to install on NetWare networks, although somewhat lacking in management features. You can, however, use Kyocera's Print Monitor utility, which uses SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and provides more detail than the EcoLink software about status and activity and can also be used to manage other SNMP-compliant printers.

Overall, the FS-3750 offers some welcome improvements over its predecessor and would be a good choice for small offices or departments. It can't match Hewlett-Packard's LaserJet 4050 (reviewed issue 58, p160) for print quality, but Kyocera's remarkably low running costs weigh heavily in its favour as they will produce substantial savings in the long run.