Kyocera FS-3700 review

Competition for the workgroup printing market has never been hotter. All the major players have recently released new or updated ranges. Even IBM has returned after a five-year absence. Now Kyocera has joined the party with two new models: the 12ppm FS-1700; and a fast 18ppm FS-3700, which is the one I looked at.

Its most remarkable feature is its incredibly low printing costs. You can choose between two toner cartridges which, at five per cent coverage, can deliver either a 10,000-sheet or a 15,000-sheet life span. The first option costs £51, equating to 0.51p per page, but the higher volume version is worth going for as at £60 it brings costs down to 0.4p per page, making it unbeatable value. The recommended duty cycle for the FS-3700 of 50,000 pages per month means that it's capable of handling prolonged heavy usage as well.

Considering the FS-3700 has an 18ppm print engine, it's surprisingly small. The basic unit weighs in at only 14kg and measures 310 x 373 x 383mm. Standard paper capacity is 250 sheets of A4, which can be significantly boosted by adding a paper path adaptor and up to two 500-sheet base trays at £275 each. A small drop-down multipurpose tray at the front can handle a further 100 sheets or operate as a manual feed for heavier media.

The printer doesn't sense the paper size or mode, so these details have to be entered from the control panel. A small connector at the back of the tray is provided for an additional 70-envelope power feeder. Double-sided printing is also available as an option, but the duplexing unit will set you back £650.

Choosing between the top or rear output is carried out from the control panel. High-end printers allow this to be done via the driver options, but at this level it usually requires a switch or lever to be manually operated. On the Kyocera, pressing the Stack button automatically operates an internal guide, so you can toggle between the two modes easily.

The printer uses Kyocera's own controller board with a 33MHz processor chip and 2Mb of memory. Two spare 72-pin SIMM sockets allow this to be upgraded to a maximum of 66Mb. An alternative option is to use the PCMCIA 2.1-compatible PC Card slot at the side of the printer for up to 16Mb of Flash ROM or SRAM. Standard interfaces are an RS232/422A serial port and a bidirectional parallel port.

Kyocera provides a host of optional EcoLink SNMP-compliant cards for network connection. There's only room for one, but you can opt for LocalTalk (£110), Ethernet with 10BaseT and 10Base2 ports, or Token Ring (£435). Many companies are migrating to Fast Ethernet, and Kyocera can also supply a 100BaseTX card (£399) - even Hewlett-Packard has to rely on third-party manufacturers for this option. Adding a network card bumps up the price, and it's worth noting that the FS-3700 only comes with PCL5e emulation so you'll need to find a further £249 if you want to add PostScript Level 2 emulation as well.

As you'd expect from a 600 x 600dpi print engine, text quality is excellent. To simulate a 1,200dpi resolution, the FS-3700 uses another variation on the image enhancement theme called KIR (Kyocera Image Refinement). This is no different from any other manufacturer's method, as it aims to smooth out ragged edges on curves and diagonals. However, graphics quality was generally disappointing, with excessive banding that even cleaning couldn't eradicate.

I found the quoted print speed for the FS-3700 to be slightly conservative. Printing a 24-page Word document with a standard font and little formatting resulted in a time to first page of 14 seconds - three seconds faster than Kyocera's quoted figure. After that, the document was delivered at an average speed of 18.5ppm.