Kyocera Mita FS-3830N

This unassuming A4 mono laser printer can form the basis of a versatile, expanding print centre for growing networks. The FS-3830N is designed to accept a variety of add-on kits including extra feeder cassettes, a duplexer, and some impressive sorter and stacker options as your printing demands grow.

As standard, input paper is fed from a cassette complete with paper-level indicator, inserted drawer-style at the front and supporting a generous 500 sheets. A 100-sheet multipurpose tray folds open and extends just above the cassette, and printed sheets emerge from the top, face down.

Kyocera also offers a money-back guarantee on its consumables, revealing some self confidence in its Ecosys print technology that aims to keep your outgoings low. At just half a penny per sheet, the FS-3830N presents a level of efficiency few manufacturers can match.

The toner and OPC drum are small but long-lasting and easily fitted and replaced from above. To save you removing these items to free up a paper jam, you can pull on a large green tab just behind the input cassette, which then slides out the main paper path section of the print engine for easy access. The printer control menus aren't so cleverly designed: they follow a particular logic, no doubt, but we found them confusing and unintuitive.

Inevitably for a workhorse network laser, performance is good. In our tests, outputting multiple sheets from Microsoft Excel, we achieved an average print speed of 26ppm (pages per minute). This is short of the 33ppm claimed by Kyocera Mita, but still good enough for any busy workgroup just the same. Full-page graphics and hi-res images rarely took longer than 15 seconds to print.

Print quality isn't as impressive. It's acceptable but suffers from a grainy effect over all grey tones, while text begins to fill in at 4pt. You might have expected better from an A4 mono laser costing a huge £610. And this is the crunch: the FS-3830N's consumables are cheap but the core hardware is offputtingly expensive.

Author: Alistair Dabbs