Fujitsu PrintPartner 20W

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Fujitsu's mono laser printers have a great deal going for them. Its chassis and print engine are often seen in other manufacturers' product ranges with Lexmark's Optra K1220 built around the PrintPartner 12V, while Tally offers both the 12 and 16ppm models in its printer line-up. Although the PrintPartner range has been around for many years, it's only now that Fujitsu has chosen to move into the large format departmental laser market with the PrintPartner 20W offering an A4 20ppm print speed and A3 paper handling. True resolution stands at 600dpi, which can be improved to a simulated 1,200dpi using resolution enhancement.

It uses the same distinctive chassis styling as its stablemates, with a comprehensive control panel and LCD set to the right of the top output bin. Both PCL6 and PostScript 2 emulations are included, although standard memory is a paltry 8Mb, which proved woefully inadequate when using the PCL6 driver for high-resolution graphics. Fortunately, a couple of SIMM sockets lurking behind the side panel allow memory to be increased to 72Mb using industry-standard modules.

The single lower paper cassette has room for 250 sheets, while a flip-down multipurpose tray at the front adds another 100 sheets to the total and both can handle A3 sizes. A small face-up stacker at the rear can be used in conjunction with the multipurpose tray to provide a perfectly flat path through the printer for heavier media. There's plenty of expansion potential as up to three 250- or 500-sheet lower trays can be added bringing capacity up to an impressive 1,750 sheets. A duplex unit for double-sided printing is also available, which comes with its own 250-sheet cassette and replaces the standard paper tray. As the trays are deeper than the printer chassis, they protrude some 60mm further back and each has a small plastic cover to protect its contents.

Toner is supplied in packs of two bottles (£59), with each one lasting for 5,000 A4 pages at five per cent coverage. The print unit (£179) needs replacing after 40,000 pages, while the fuser unit (£159) goes into retirement after 100,000 pages and must be replaced by a field engineer. Overall printing costs come to a reasonable 1.2p per page - the same as that offered by Hewlett-Packard's A3 LaserJet 5000 (reviewed issue 44, p165). However, it doesn't even come close to Kyocera's FS-6700 (reviewed issue 52, p 172), which can turn out a page for a mere 0.3p.

Print quality was a mixed bag, with text at 600dpi perfectly clean and sharp. It's pointless using image enhancement for text as you won't see any improvements at 1,200dpi. Graphics, on the other hand, were marred by banding and an unpleasant graininess that even image smoothing couldn't remedy. The best results came from the PostScript 2 driver, which revealed far more detail and used better memory management. We wouldn't recommend using the PCL6 driver for 1,200dpi graphics as it persistently failed with memory overruns. An extra 16Mb cleared A4-related problems, but it was still unable to produce a full-page A3 photograph even with 40Mb installed. The PostScript 2 driver also links up with the printer's LCD panel and displays the application and filename of the current print job.

The 20W achieved the quoted A4 print speeds at 600dpi with a 15-page Word document delivered at an average of 19.5ppm, although this dropped to 14.5ppm for a heavily-formatted 23-page business document. At 1,200dpi, speed took a sharp dip with the Word document printed at a rate of 11ppm and the PCL6 driver failed to complete the business document without the extra 16Mb of memory.