Kyocera Ecosys FS-600

Kyocera's early adoption of a green manufacturing and marketing stance always struck me as opportunistic, but a few years on, I have to admit that I was being a little over-cynical of Kyocera's motives.

These days, Kyocera can claim that its Ecosys range is almost entirely constructed from reclaimable, recyclable or at least innocuously disposable components, right down to its toxin-free toner and high-calcium, clean-burning plastic toner cartridges that can be safely incinerated. Ecosys printers also feature an innovative, hard-wearing ceramic developer drum, guaranteed for 300,000 pages or three years (effectively the lifetime of the product) and a separate, inexpensive toner cartridge, designed to bring both operating costs and waste product generation down to a minimum.

Most of Kyocera's products have been positioned at the mid to top end of the market, but the new FS-600 is unashamedly personal in its appeal. With a list price of £299, it's easy to see why this true 600dpi printer might generate considerable interest in the small business markets.

Personal printers need to be small and neat, and the FS-600 certainly doesn't disappoint, containing itself within a very modest 353 x 300 x 225mm footprint. It's also surprisingly light, at just 7kg. If you choose to add the optional 250-sheet feeder, this only adds to the height since it fits below the main unit. Bought separately it costs £130, or you can choose both as a bundle for £429. The case is an attractive combination of curves, and looks more expensive than it is.

The internal 150-sheet paper tray slides in at the front, and printed pages emerge to stack face down on the top of the unit. A straight path, face up output catcher folds out at the back, completing the structural homage to HP's excellent and practically cubic LaserJet design. There's a parallel port peeping out of the back panel, but you can opt for an Ethernet interface if your definition of a personal printer includes letting everybody else in the office use it as well. There's even a Level 2 PostScript option available for the FS-600, but at £249, there aren't likely to be many takers, especially given the target market.

Something of Kyocera's previous commitment to more elaborate devices is evident in the number of buttons and LEDs adorning the top right-hand side of the machine. Everything is remarkably self-explanatory, however, and I didn't find myself nervously flicking through the manual trying to work out which one would cause a reset and which one would start World War III.

I wish I could report that the initial installation was a breeze too, but unfortunately, the steps outlined in the manual for installing the Windows 95 PCL driver bear no relation to reality. Kyocera assures me that the appropriate addendum will be in place just as soon as it's finished wiping the egg from its corporate chin.

That aside, all there is to do is pop in the developer drum, slap the toner cartridge on top and close the lid. Feeding is also simplicity itself, provided you stick to the standard diet of 60g/m2 to 90g/m2 paper in A4, A5, B5 and letter formats and in keeping with its green image, Kyocera has seen to it that the printer is happy to dine on recycled laser paper. Since the toner cartridge costs just £30, and lasts for approximately 3,000 pages at the standard estimate of five per cent coverage, you're looking at a maximum cost per page of 1p, which isn't bad at all.

If you stick to uncomplicated text, using the usual two or three fonts, 600dpi output conforms almost exactly to the quoted 6ppm. Increasing the complexity can slow things down, but I suspect that boosting the base 2Mb of memory to 10Mb would remove any bottleneck. Kyocera has resisted the urge to use proprietary RAM, so popping in an 8Mb SIMM won't break the bank. Graphics pages were slower, and averaged at between ten and 17 seconds per page at 600dpi, but on a couple of occasions complex pages with error diffusion dithering refused to print at all. Again, adding more memory will almost certainly speed things up and remove this sort of glitch.