Product Reviews

Last month we reviewed HP's Color LaserJet 2820, which was the first affordable colour laser multifunction peripheral we'd seen. This similar Epson model has a fax facility and a faster printer than the HP, but it scans at a lower optical resolution.

With its top-mounted scanner, the AcuLaser seems particularly tall and imposing. It's not as heavy as it looks, though, and setting it up didn't prove too taxing. Fitting the consumables involved removing a few transit caps, but the clear screen provided some guidance.

Epson's software installation detected the AcuLaser over our network and configured it with the minimum of fuss. Both prints and scans can be made over the Ethernet interface, but we were surprised to find that no fax print driver had been

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installed. This is a frustration, but at least the 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) makes conventional faxing easy.

The CX11NF uses the same print engine as the AcuLaser C1100, and it performed similarly in our tests. It prints text with exceptionally sharp outlines, and its greyscale and colour photo prints are among the best we've seen from a laser printer. Business graphics are enhanced by strong, vibrant colours.

The printer was also quite quick, delivering the first page of our letter test in just 10 seconds, and completing all 50 copies of the letter at a rate of 23.6 pages per minute (ppm). The four-pass engine couldn't match this speed in colour, but its rate of 4.6ppm on our mixed-colour test was very respectable.

The Epson's scanner is quick for an MFP, taking under seven seconds to preview an A4 page. Scanning the same page at 300dpi took 11 seconds. Our test images were sharp with unusually good levels of detail, but suffered a slight blue colour bias that was also noticeable on colour copies. Duplicating a 10-page document using the ADF took two minutes and 16 seconds in colour, and just 35 seconds in mono.

The CX11NF is quicker than HP's similar LaserJet, and its scans and prints are better. It's a little less compact and costs slightly more to run, but with no other competition it's our Best Buy.