Kyocera FS-6700

Although the past few months have seen plenty of movement in the workgroup mono laser printer market, those looking for a budget-priced A3-capable printer haven't exactly been spoilt for choice. Hewlett-Packard's LaserJet 5000GN (reviewed issue 44, p165) offers A3 and A4 paper handling along with a top true resolution of 1,200dpi, but many will be put off by a price tag hovering around the £2,000 mark. QMS' DeskLaser 2000/Net (reviewed issue 43, p154) looks more tempting with a sub-£1,000 price but is let down by poor print quality, and its use of WPS (Windows Printing System) rather than an internal formatter meant its claimed 20ppm print speed was almost impossible to achieve.

The FS-6700 is Kyocera's attempt to redress the balance, offering A3 and A4 printing for a reasonable £1,239. Its quoted print speeds are 20ppm for A4 and 11ppm for A3, while true resolution is 600dpi, although this can be boosted to 2,400 x 600dpi using Kyocera's KIR2 (Kyocera Image Refinement) smoothing trickery. Recyclable materials are used extensively in the construction, so the only component that needs replacing is the toner cartridge. Costing £60 and good for 20,000 pages at five per cent coverage, this returns incredibly cheap running costs of 0.3p per page.

The FS-6700 won't win any prizes for design but at least it's relatively compact and comes as standard with a 250-sheet cassette as well as a 100-sheet multipurpose tray, which can both handle A3 media. This capacity can be increased by adding up to two additional 500-sheet lower trays, and double-sided printing is also available with the optional duplex unit. A useful feature that will make paper jams easier to clear is that the entire paper feed unit can be unlocked and pulled out at the front of the printer for closer inspection.

The control panel isn't the easiest to navigate, but it does provide a wealth of operational information. A small graphic of the printer with a collection of associated LEDs indicates the default input and output trays, while a separate LCD reveals the name of application printing, resolution, paper size, number of copies and the port currently in use.

Processing power is dealt with efficiently by a 100MHz PowerPC chip but the standard memory backing this up is just 4Mb. This can be increased to a maximum of 68Mb using standard SIMMs, although buying from Kyocera will result in a hefty £250 fee for a 16Mb module. There's also a slot, well hidden beneath the bulging side panel, that will accept extra memory in the shape of a standard Type 1 PC Card.

For network printing and management you can install an optional EcoLINK network card in one of two rear expansion slots, with the dual-speed version adding an extra £249 to your outlay. I found installation on a NetWare 4.11 network simple: the supplied EcoLINK management software searches for any EcoLINK cards and displays them in a list for easy selection. Both bindery and NDS (Novell Directory Services) are supported, but unlike HP's excellent JetAdmin, management features are limited. Print queues can be created but you can't assign users to them and there's no performance monitoring or resource tracking available. Web browser management over TCP/IP is available but the interface does little else than mirror the options available from the EcoLINK software.

Speed will depend on the type of document being printed, but even with an extra 16Mb of memory fitted the FS-6700 only achieved its maximum velocity when printing documents composed of plain text. A standard 24-page document was delivered smartly on A4 paper in 74 seconds for an average 19.5ppm, while plenty of complex formatting and large graphics dropped this to 16ppm. Reprinting the tests with KIR2 switched on made no difference to print speed, but removing the extra 16Mb to print with the standard 4Mb dropped it to just 10ppm. A3 performance is also heavily memory dependent and I could only achieve the quoted 11ppm with the extra memory back in place.