Kyocera Ecosys FS-800 review

With the introduction of the FS-800, Kyocera has brought low-cost mono laser printing to the small workgroup. The company's latest printer takes many of the features of its smaller sibling, the FS-600 (reviewed issue 38, p176), such as the elegant Porsche-designed chassis and environment-friendly construction, and adds PostScript Level 2 as standard along with an optional network print server card.

The FS-800's maximum true resolution is 600 x 600dpi and it uses a special ceramic developer drum, which is claimed to match the printer's lifespan -100,000 pages or three years in this case - so all you have to replace is one small toner cartridge. At £30, this is enough for 3,000 pages at five per cent coverage, resulting in a very reasonable cost of 1p per page. It can't quite match Kyocera's high-end departmental lasers, however, which can churn out pages for the ludicrously low price of 0.4p each.

The FS-800 is extremely compact, with a footprint of just 237 x 363 x 360mm (H x W x D). The standard A4 150-sheet tray sits underneath, and capacity can be boosted with an optional second 250-sheet tray (£130). Alternatively, if you opt for the twin-cassette version (£615) from the outset you'll save £35. The only external difference between this printer and the FS-600 is a simple control panel with six buttons which resides on the right-hand side of the top panel, partnered by a small but informative LCD display panel.

The main difference lies under the hood. The FS-800 comes with 4Mb of memory as standard integrated onto the controller board, and there's a spare SIMM socket for upgrades of up to 36Mb. Kyocera can supply memory, but it's expensive compared with standard SIMMs - £69 for 4Mb! - even when you consider it's security-coded as an anti-theft measure.

Along with a speedy 50MHz PowerPC processor, the FS-800 features PostScript Level 2 emulation as standard. This is worth taking into account, as most manufacturers will charge around £250 for such an option.

Kyocera's EcoLINK print server cards provide network connection and remote print services. There are two options on offer: a standard Ethernet card with 10BaseT and 10Base2 ports, and a 10/00BaseTX autosensing version. For testing, I connected the FS-800 to a NetWare 4.11 network. Installation was fairly straightforward, although some of the documentation is vague and confusing. Experienced support staff won't have any problems, but small offices with users relatively new to the joys of networking could come unstuck.

For basic remote configuration and management you can use Kyocera's EcoLINK software. This gives you access to the printer over the network and lets you create and assign NetWare print queues using NDS (Novell Directory Services) or bindery emulation. The Print Monitor utility provides more detailed information about media supplies and lets you view the LCD display and lock the control panel. If you have TCP/IP configured, you can also use a Web browser to view and modify some of the more basic network settings.

For general text printing the FS-800 matched its quoted speed, completing a 16-page Word document in precisely two minutes. A nine-page report with embedded charts and graphics caused it to stutter slightly, though with print speeds dropping marginally to 7.5ppm (page per minute). However, when it came to the mono laser test, it struggled to deal with 24 pages of heavy formatting and large photographic images. It took nearly six minutes to print this test at a modest 4ppm, although adding an extra 32Mb boosted this to 6.5ppm. You'll also need a memory upgrade if you're printing complex photographic images, as I encountered memory overruns when testing with the basic 4Mb.