Panasonic KXCL510

Panasonic's KXCL510 is a colour-capable laser printer that promises print speeds of up 21ppm. Setup is painless enough, with well-designed toner cartridges sliding in and out of the top panel with ease. We had slight concerns with the solidity of some of the panels, which didn't feel like they'd stand up to much abuse. You also need to keep access free to all sides of the unit, including the back, if you want to fully turn off the power.

The driver software is accessible, but more advanced options take a little digging out. The remote-management software comprises a local status monitor, as well as a comprehensive web-administration tool, via the built-in web server.

As far as performance goes, printing through our 50-page plain text document took two minutes, 49 seconds - 18 seconds of which were taken up with processing. This falls just shy of 20ppm, although it's still respectably fast, and the quality was as good as we'd expect from a laser, with crisp, well-defined text. Speed dropped to just over 16ppm when we introduced our 50-page colour letter and, although the letterhead came out smoothly, the light-green text element looked grainy and pale.

Performance took a heavy hit when printing a 12-page Excel spreadsheet and graphs. With an average wait of around ten seconds between pages, the speed dropped to a sluggish 4ppm, taking over three minutes to complete. Quality was acceptable, though, with good alignment meaning crisp, solidly defined areas of colour and no bordering on text. Intense colour tones were represented well, but lighter shades were again noticeably grainy and exhibited slight banding.

It was a similar story in our graphics-heavy 24-page DTP test, which crept out at 6ppm and again revealed issues on graphics and coloured text. Images were undersaturated and mildly banded, and we noticed a distinct graininess visible even at arm's length. These results would be acceptable for basic use, but they lack the definition and impact needed for presentations.

The model we reviewed had no hard disk installed, and because of this it wouldn't collate the five copies of our four-page PDF document. This is inconvenient if you print multiple runs of documents, and at £399 for a 10GB model it's an annoying omission and it would also add secure printing facilities. Print times were fast, though, at just over 17ppm, without the usual processing delays the PDF document often produces.

Printing a copy of our challenging photomontage on highest-quality settings took one minute, 40 seconds and again demonstrated extremely grainy results, looking well below the 1,200dpi specification. Undersaturation and banding also contributed to a poor rendering of skin-tone graduations, with only strong colours exhibiting solidity. Black-and-white images also lacked neutrality, looking slightly blue.

As for running costs, Panasonic is currently offering two years worth of mono toner free, which is certainly worth taking into account - see www.panasonic.co.uk/document/free-printing-offer for full details. Running costs are otherwise expensive at 1.62p per page in mono and a more reasonable 7.64p in colour - compare that with the Kyocera Mita FS-C5016N and its 0.76p and 3.24p if running costs are a concern. Costing £1,399, the Kyocera is slightly slower, but overall performance will prove more satisfactory.

Author: Ross Burridge