Inkjets might be handy for printing colour photos but, for workaday mono printing, you still can’t beat the crisp, smudge-proof output of a laser printer such as the Kyocera FS820.

Inkjets might be handy for printing colour photos but, for workaday mono printing, you still can’t beat the crisp, smudge-proof output of a laser. Ideal for the home or small office, Kyocera’s entry-level FS-820 is amazingly compact and lightweight but still manages to incorporate rugged feeling build quality, giving the firm impression that it will last for years. And while there’s only a standard 12-month warranty on the printer itself, the drum and developer unit are guaranteed for three years or 100,000 pages.

There are plenty of laser printers around at this price point, or even cheaper, but the FS-820 boasts some impressive specs for the money. For starters, you get a speedy 16 pages-per-minute output, based on PCL 6 and PCL 5e printer emulation. The printer also comes with Prescribe IIe controller language and a wide range of built-in fonts that include 80 outline fonts, one bitmap font and 46 barcodes. Connection choices include both parallel and USB 2.0, although there’s no network option. A particularly nice addition is the CompactFlash card slot, which is ideal for storing electronic forms and barcode printing.

You can load the single cassette-type input tray with up to 250 sheets of paper, making the most of the FS-820’s high-speed printing abilities without having to top it up too often. The speed performance extends to the warm-up time from cold, which is 16 seconds from power-up. In our tests, even after leaving the printer on idle for an hour, we still managed to get a first page print time of just over 10 seconds, which is another plus point.

With excellent font definition and extremely good greyscale picture printing, you start to wonder if there’s a catch. At the selling price, the catch is normally in the cost of consumables but, here again, the FS-820 is very frugal. Based on the usual five per cent toner coverage, a standard TK-110 toner cartridge should last you for 6,000 pages. With Kyocera’s suggested replacement price of $125.00, this works out to less than 10 cents per print.
We’ve always been impressed by Kyocera’s laser printers and, at the price, the FS-820 makes the perfect choice for high-speed, personal laser printing.

Reccomended Retail $195.00