Kyocera Mita FS-2020D

There's a 100-sheet multipurpose tray which folds down from the front of this printer, too. It can take media of up to 220g/m² – quite thick card. An extra 500-sheet tray is an option, if you need more capacity or you have to handle letterheads.

An extra paper tray provides 1100 pages total

At the back are USB and parallel sockets, but no Ethernet. If you need to network the machine – isn’t that an essential element of a ‘team’ printer? – you’ll need the FS-2020DN, which is an extra £65, or you could add a Netgear external print server for around £25 and call it near enough.

As with nearly all Kyocera Mita machines, the FS-2020D uses a ceramic drum which lasts the lifetime of the machine. As well as meaning you only pay for toner, it makes maintenance easy. Flip up the front end of the top cover and clip in the supplied 6000-page toner cartridge. The machine runs through a once-only charge cycle which takes around ten minutes and is then ready to go.

Now, 6000 pages may sound like a lot, but this is a half-filled starter cartridge and a standard consumable weighs in at 12,000 pages, so you won't be replacing toner every other week.

Both PCL 6 and PostScript Level 3 are emulated in the driver and support is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and various flavours of Unix and Linux.

Kyocera Mita claims a speed of 35ppm for this machine, but this is under ideal conditions. Printing a five-page document, still the average length for most office jobs, took 20 seconds, which equates to 15ppm. This includes processing time, which most suppliers still decline to include in their speed figures. It's just as much a part of the printing process as feeding the paper through, so there's no valid reason to exclude it.

There's only toner to top up, so maintenance is easy

Increasing the print run to 20 pages increases the print speed to 24ppm, which is nearer to the headline speed, though still not that close. We tried printing in draft mode, but the speed improvement was a marginal 2ppm. Speeds are still reasonable for a machine in this class, though, and the draft print mode is better than many and might well be acceptable for internal documentation.