Tally T3016C SprintJet

The laser is becoming one of the most popular choices for high-speed, high-quality office printing, but it does serve a specific market. While some of the faster models are being put forward as office printers and photocopier replacements, the limited lifespan and replacement costs of the majority of their internal components mean they're not the best choice for high-volume production printing. Many companies that regularly produce large billing or cheque runs, shipping lists and so on will be looking for a printer that offers reliability, longevity, low running costs and the ability to print on a variety of media including continuous stationery.

The T3016C SprintJet from Tally targets this market and aims to offer low running and maintenance costs, plus high reliability and support for a wide range of form types. With a top speed of only 16ppm, it's not designed as a laser replacement in the traditional office environment, but as a step up from the older dot-matrix printers where printing on multipart forms isn't a requirement.

Although the printer range is aimed primarily at mono printing, the T3016C on review can add a splash of colour to your forms, as it accepts a single-colour cartridge. Tally offers cyan, magenta, yellow, green and red varieties. The main mono ink cartridge slots in neatly underneath the top panel and lasts for an impressive 40 million characters. As the T3016C can print on wide variety of formats, it's more difficult to equate this to page life, but Tally puts this at around 20,000 pages at 5 per cent coverage.

Print head life is even more impressive, as the T3016C introduces a new design that uses two 128-nozzle piezo inkjet heads, and the whole unit lasts for an amazing two billion characters, which equates to around one million pages. Add in a basic maintenance kit and you have printing costs of between 0.15p and 0.3p per page.

Another key feature of the T3016C is that it uses a specially developed oil-based ink, which has been APACS (Association for Payment Clearing Services) accredited for secure cheque printing. This is designed to combat fraud, as it guarantees that any cheques printed on the T3016C can't be modified. With certain solvents, it's possible to remove ink and toner from cheques produced on non-accredited printers.

The printer is well built, with a large flip-up panel at the front providing access to a pair of tractor feeders. The printer accepts up to 406mm-wide continuous stationery and can sense the width automatically and load the paper to the correct position. The paper path is virtually flat, as the stationery is fed out the rear where it can be collected and folded in bins. An automatic sheet feeder is also on offer, which slots neatly into a recess on the top panel. However, with this in place, you can't use continuous stationery, as it blocks the paper path. A small control panel and LCD is provided to one side. This offers a poorly constructed menu system, which I found difficult to use.

Parallel and serial ports are provided for local connection, but Tally also offers an optional Ethernet print server adaptor that converts the parallel port for network printing and comes with a 10/100BaseTX Ethernet port and external power supply unit. There's probably not a great need for sharing the T3016C over the network, but if you go for this option you'll find it offers plenty of useful features and support for a wide range of networking environments. Installation starts by using the ARP (address resolution protocol) to force an IP address on the print server and then you can move directly to Web browser management.