Kyocera FS-1020D

As a follow-up to Kyocera's FS-1010, which has been on our A List ever since its launch, the FS-1020D adds extra speed and features, as well as another £45 to the price tag. But for this, you'll not only get 20ppm, but also duplexing as standard and print quality that's hard to fault.

Our 50-page plain-text document appeared in two minutes, 41 seconds - 13 seconds of which were taken up with processing, which matched the quoted speed of 20ppm. The 50-page colour letter caused no complications either and came out at the same speed. Quality was up to par too, with solid, defined characters, strong line graphics and good mono translation of colour elements.

Running the Excel workbook test didn't stop the FS-1020D in its tracks either. Whereas the complicated spreadsheets often slow things down, all 12 pages appeared in just 45 seconds, including 13 seconds for processing. That equates to 22.5ppm, and quality was again impressive. The close contrast spreadsheet tables were still perfectly legible, and the unprinted white text was cleanly defined, with the solid areas of graphs exhibiting a pleasing contrast and no banding.

Things began to slow down with our 24-page DTP document, which came out at a still speedy 18ppm and again demonstrated good contrast and clarity. We noticed some areas of tonal graduation looked a little blocky, though. Next came our 5MB DTP document, of which we printed five copies. After a 25-second delay for processing, the pages churned out at a rate of just over 9ppm. There's no option to collate the individual documents in the print job, which is a shame, but it isn't an everyday problem unless you routinely produce large amounts of multipage documents.

Our high-resolution photomontage appeared in just under 30 seconds, although we found some of the areas a little banded, especially on the highest 1,200dpi setting. A couple of the images also appeared slightly grainy, and the representation of skin tones wasn't as smooth as we'd have liked.

Finally, we printed out our mono quality document. Impressively, text down to 4pt was still legible, something that printers costing five times as much don't always manage. Again, there was a slight lack of subtlety in the handling of complex contrast graduations, but considering the price it's still an impressive performance. The only major gripe we have is the slight curving of paper that occurs during printing, which causes pages to be pushed off the paper tray and makes collation tricky.

We're happy with the running costs, though. With a black toner cartridge costing £49 for 10,000 pages, it works out at a reasonable 0.68p per page. At £233 for a replacement imaging drum, it's worth just buying a new printer, although it's guaranteed to last at least three years or 100,000 pages and, in reality, will probably last longer.

This is an excellent personal laser for the money and, as the FS-1010 heads off to retirement, the FS-1020D makes a worthy successor in the ranks of our A List.

Author: Ross Burridge