Epson AcuLaser M2000DN review

Epson's multitalented M2000DN almost squeezed itself into last month's sub-£200 laser Labs, so in this month's company it looks good value. Indeed, to be able to boast automatic duplex printing, an Ethernet connection complete with embedded web-page management server, and other business-class features, such as PCL6 and 5e emulations and a genuine Adobe PostScript 3 driver, is remarkable at this price.

Look a little closer, however, and you can see how Epson has pulled it off. The printer is only rated at a maximum throughput of 20,000 pages per month. That works out at 113 pages per hour, assuming a 22-day working month at eight hours per day, so you can see that in a busy workgroup environment it could quickly become overwhelmed.

Paper input capacity is also limited. The standard input cassette is a 250-sheet unit, and although you can add further trays, they're also limited to 250 sheets each (£102 exc VAT).

But this is nothing next to the printer's running costs. After 30,000 pages, the M2000DN will have set you back a whopping £749 exc VAT, and the longer you own it the more it costs.

It isn't the most rapid printer, either. It's rated at 28ppm - the same as the Oki and Samsung - and it matched those printers stride for stride in our tests. The 50-page repeated ISO text document was churned out at a rate of 28ppm with a processing time of 12 seconds. The 12-page Excel spreadsheet dropped that rate to a less impressive 23ppm, but the other documents were printed at a respectable 27ppm. Duplex prints, meanwhile, added 66% to the print time of our 24-page DTP-style Word document.

And quality, as with speed, put the AcuLaser at the bottom. Only the intensity of the blacks impressed: despite the true 1,200 x 1,200dpi resolution, text was middling, photographic output was dark and showed evidence of banding, and gradients were stepped.

The M2000DN is competitively priced for the features on offer. As it stands, though, its high running costs and poor output quality make it an also-ran.

Author: Jonathan Bray