Kyocera FS-C2026MFP review

It wasn't so long ago that colour laser MFPs were an expensive luxury for small businesses. Kyocera's FS-C2026MFP aims to bring these features within their budgets, and costs slightly less than the PC Pro Recommended Xerox WorkCentre 3550X mono MFP.

Print speeds are usually a casualty in the quest for value, but the FS-C2026MFP delivers a fast 26ppm for both colour and mono. Running costs are also reasonable, with a colour page costing just over 6p, and this can be reduced by buying bulk packs of four toner cartridges. The printer is shipped with half-full starter cartridges, so initial costs will be higher.

The printer combines A4 colour printing with integral duplexing, scan and copy functions, but fax is absent on this model. It can't be upgraded, but the FS-C2126MFP has an integral 33.6Kbits/sec fax modem and costs £830 exc VAT.

The Windows and TWAIN driver installs are fully automated, but Kyocera doesn't provide any extra software bundles. All you get is a utility for directly printing downloaded PDFs.

Mono print speeds are on the money, with Word documents churned out at 26ppm using the enhanced driver setting. Print quality is good, with pin-sharp text and mono photos showing good levels of detail and none of the banding we saw with Xerox's WorkCentre.

Scanned images can be sent directly to email, FTP servers, Windows share locations, a local USB stick and WSD (web services on devices) compatible PCs simply by hitting the Scan button and selecting an entry in the address book.

Access can be restricted with network authentication or a locally stored list of password-protected users, and you can import address books from LDAP servers. Once the LDAP server has been registered, users can be selected from an address book at the printer's panel.

Colour prints were handled well, with our test DTP prints also returning 26ppm. Quality for general business use is fine, but photos looked slightly pallid and lacking in impact. The driver's range of colour settings include a Vivid option, but these made no appreciable difference.

Copies of colour documents also suffered, with pale colours not reproduced at all. The scanner wasn't at fault as emailing the same documents as PDFs showed impressive levels of detail.

Colour quality may not be up to professional standards, but the FS-C2026MFP performs very well in all other departments. The software bundle is a bit stingy, but this is still one of the best-value colour laser MFPs currently available.

Author: Dave Mitchell