Tally T8024 review

Tally's latest colour laser weighs in at a hefty 35kg and promises heavyweight speeds too. After 21 seconds of processing, the first 48 pages of our 50-page plain text document came out at a rate of just over 25ppm, followed by 40 seconds of thinking. The final two pages eventually popped out after a total of three minutes, six seconds, reducing the overall speed to a less impressive 18ppm.

This continued to happen every 48 pages and also affected the 50 copies of our colour letter. Processing time increased to a lengthy 31 seconds, with the 24ppm of the first 48 pages again reducing to 18ppm overall.

We were perfectly happy with text quality, which was crisp and dark, although we found our colour letterhead appeared overly dithered. Our 12-page Excel workbook was next and began churning out after an impressive 13 seconds. The pace kept up too, narrowly missing 25ppm. We felt that the coloured backgrounds of the spreadsheet were a little lacking in vivacity and the white (unprinted) text slightly discoloured, but the results were still more than adequate for presentation use. Some subtle banding appeared on the graphs, along with some minor alignment issues, but there were no other complaints.

Our 24-page DTP document printed at 25ppm, after a gap of 16 seconds' processing time. This again showed a little dullness in terms of colour, although the tone was natural and any banding subtle. The five copies of a four-page DTP document caused 23 seconds of processing time before appearing at a rate of 16ppm. The T8024 also collated them, something that most printers won't do without a hard disk installed. Quality was largely good, although the lacklustre colouring extended to blue and red text, standing in stark contrast to the solid black.

Upping the quality settings to maximum for our photomontage failed to boost the intensity, and resulted in slightly more obvious banding. Skin tones looked reasonable, but were marred by a lack of subtlety on the tricky graduated areas. We also found that the black-and-white element of the document had a slight red tinge to it, and the colour ramps were a little uneven.

Our gruelling mono quality document showed that text down to 6pt was reproduced crisply, but smaller sizes rapidly degraded in legibility. There were also issues with uneven greyscale ramps, as well as a lack of contrast on complex imagery.

There's little else to complain over, though; the unit is solidly built, if bulky, and consumables are easily changed, plus there's duplexing built in as standard. Tally couldn't supply us with lifetimes for its imaging drum or fuser, so we can't give accurate running costs, but in terms of toner costs the T8024 is average at 0.42p per page for mono and 5.37p for colour. The driver interface is well laid out, enabling changes to be made swiftly, and the menu system is perfectly usable. We'd like to have seen a little more feedback from the two-line LCD, but it does the job.

All in all, the quality is ample for basic presentation use, but the 8024's lack of reproduction subtlety and colour vibrancy don't make it the ideal candidate when you need to graphically impress. If you're doing a lot of colour printing, take a look at the £1,399 Kyocera Mita FS-C5016, which offers a substantially lower colour cost per page (2.45p), although, again, quality isn't remarkable. Otherwise, the T8024 is a reasonable choice.

Author: Ross Burridge