QMS 2060 Executive

Best known for its ultra-cheap colour laser printers, QMS is now entering into a market already spoilt for choice. The new 2060 range comprises five 20ppm monochrome laser printers and is aimed at the small to medium-sized workgroup. The printer chassis is basically the same across the range, but each model has varying specifications. The 2060 Executive reviewed here has the highest level of features, and targets those users who need fast, high-quality printing on A3 and A4 paper sizes. Initially, the £4,795 price tag looks high. But you get a massive 48Mb of memory, an internal hard disk, a duplexing unit for double-sided printing and a CrownNet network print server card all thrown in.

The Executive requires plenty of desktop space, as it measures 545 « 383 « 403mm. Overall paper capacity is comparatively modest. The standard lower tray has room for only 250 sheets. An extra 250-sheet universal tray (£250) can be added underneath, or you can go for a 500-sheet A4 only tray instead (£250). One paper path is available for individual sheets with an output bin at the top of the printer. You slide out a sturdy support bar at the front for A3 printing, and you access the toner cartridge for replacement by flipping up the top panel.

Toner costs £165 and is good for 10,000 pages at five per cent coverage. This equates to an overall printing cost of 1.65p per page - expensive when you consider that's over four times as much as Kyocera's FS-3700 18ppm laser (reviewed issue 29, p154).

The Executive uses an NEC 4300 100MHz processor, making it one of the most powerful printers in the workgroup market. A CrownNet print server card is integrated onto the motherboard and provides 10Base2 and 10BaseT network connections. A Type-B Centronics parallel port can be used for local connection and a SCSI mini-port allows up to three external hard disks to be added. A CrownCopy flatbed scanner with a 50-page document feeder can be connected instead, turning the Executive into a photocopier as well. But this is an expensive option as, at £1,995, it costs nearly half as much as the printer itself.

With all this power it's no surprise that the Executive records some impressive performance times. Using a standard 24-page Word document, the Executive delivered precisely 20ppm for A4. This dropped to around 11ppm for A3 paper. The internal hard disk makes its presence felt when multiple print runs are sent to the printer. The 2060 spools them in readiness, so there's virtually no pausing between jobs.

The final speed test was a large photographic image printed on A3 paper at 1,200 « 1,200dpi resolution. Most printers in this class would balk at this task, but the Executive quietly loaded the image onto its hard disk and dropped the print into the output tray after only three minutes.

Another feature of the Executive is its ability to print edge to edge on A3. Graphics print quality is extremely good at the top resolution, with only minor banding visible in the darker areas. No benefits will be gained from printing text at 1,200dpi, but the lower 600dpi resolution is enough to produce crisp, sharp characters.

The 2060 Executive looks like a comprehensive solution for high-quality printing, but QMS has overlooked two important areas: installation and ease of use. I installed the Executive on a NetWare 4.1 network for testing, but gave up after two days.

A utility called CrownAdmin is supplied which is supposed to detect the printer and allow configuration over the network. To start with, the utility wouldn't load correctly, and even after I installed CrownAdmin on a different Win95 PC it couldn't detect the printer. A call to QMS support identified the problem as the default printer name that must be changed at the printer's control panel which, incidentally, is so complex it defies logical explanation.