Epson EPL-5700

The launch of the EPL-5700 is acknowledgement of the fact that inkjet print quality has reached the point where it's good enough, and fast enough, to compete with low-end lasers. It's a fact that has become all too apparent in recent times as the number of new personal laser printers being launched has dried to a trickle.

Epson's response to this market shift has been to move the entry point for its laser printers upmarket. And although at just under £400 the Epson EPL-5700 is expensive - about twice the price we've come to expect from entry-level lasers - it does offer features to match. The printer boasts an 8ppm print engine, which is faster than all but the swiftest of inkjets. It's powered by a 100MHz RISC processor and backed up by 4Mb of memory. It also offers 600dpi printing, which can be enhanced to a simulated 1,200dpi by using Epson's MicroGrey 1200 halftoning.

Equally important, the EPL-5700 has more advanced paper handling than most inkjets or entry-level lasers. The front-mounted cassette can hold up to 150 sheets, and an optional 500-sheet paper feeder is available. Paper output is either face-up to the rear of the machine, or facedown onto the top. The machine itself is moderately sized at 389 x 310 x 240mm, but the paper tray adds another 170mm to the depth and, as it's of the cassette type, can't be folded away when not in use.

The standard 4Mb of memory can be upgraded easily using standard 72-pin SIMMs, and you can carry out the upgrade in less than five minutes by removing the side of the printer. With the cost of memory these days, upgrading to the maximum 36Mb should cost no more than around £30.

As well as the conventional bidirectional parallel interface, the EPL-5700 also has a serial interface as standard, and Ethernet, Coax and TwinAx interfaces are optional. You can get hold of the EPL-5700 as a £599 network machine with an Ethernet interface supporting 10BaseT and 10Base2, or as a PostScript printer with EpsonScript Level 2 and 8Mb of memory for the same price.

Installing the printer is refreshingly straightforward, as it should be, and Epson's excellent manual will have you up and running in just a few minutes. The printer driver itself also has full on-line help, but I found this to be a little unreliable in places. Otherwise, you'll find the new drivers relatively easy to use with a good range of features.

The watermarking feature is particularly innovative. It has eight default phrases - draft, confidential and do not copy are among the list - and you can create your own using text or bitmaps. There's also an option to allow the watermark to print on the face or backside of the document, which is a little confusing. It's not a duplex option, despite what it sounds like, and in practice I couldn't see any difference regardless of how the option was set.

In terms of quality, the EPL-5700 is a mixed bag. Graphics quality isn't ideal. Printing a 6 x 4in photograph revealed irregular patterns in what were supposed to be solid areas of colour, and an A4 print of a PhotoCD image emerged with 25mm chopped off the top and the bottom 35mm corrupted. I thought the latter problem might be a memory issue - the file was over 3Mb - but adding a further 4Mb of memory made no difference.

Text quality, on the other hand, is as sharp and crisp as you'd expect from a 600dpi printer right down to the very smallest of font sizes. Speed, too, was up to the claimed 8ppm, but only when printing very basic jobs. For instance, when printing a straightforward text page, the first page appeared in 18 seconds on average, and thereafter the EPL-5700 managed to deliver eight copies in 68 seconds. A more complex five-page document, on the other hand, took 52 seconds for a speed of just under 6ppm. Overall, this is a reasonably good speed performance that's on a par with the Kyocera FS-800 (reviewed issue 46, p158). It's not surprising, however, to find that it's not quite as fast as the OkiPage 10i/n (reviewed opposite).