Review Kyocera Mita makes a range of laser printers and multi-functionals from personal one-per-desk models right up to big-league machines that can handle small-run production print jobs. The FS-2020D is a ‘team’ printer, so medium-size groups of workers are the users it's been developed for. There are a few things it needs to do to fulfill this aim.

Kyocera Mita's FS-2020D: utilitarian rather than glamorous styling

A workgroup laser needs to be able to take good quantities of consumables so you’re not always refilling it. It needs to be quick enough that staff aren't standing idle waiting for print jobs to finish. And, of course, it needs to produce print good enough for general use in an office or to hand to customers. These days, it needs to print duplex and have low running costs, too.

The FS-2020D has a utilitarian design, with a cream-coloured body topped off with a dark grey top. There are two small fan vents on the left side, together with a hatch for the waste toner bottle, but at least the power switch is near the front and the USB drive socket is set in the front panel, rather than being round the back, as on some of the company's past models.

A tinted panel set in the top cover shows the top of the print cartridge inside, so you can see what you need to order as a replacement. The FS-2020D and the two other models in the range, the FS-3920D and FS-4020D, all have different toner cartridges, where the equivalent models in the Kyocera Mita's previous range shared consumables.

The company claims this is to combat the number of counterfeit cartridges available, but it works as a disadvantage if you’re a customer who uses different models from the new range, as it means you have to stock extra consumables.

The control panel is simple, but effective, with a ring of navigation controls around an OK button, as well as separate coloured buttons to start and stop a print job. There's a two-line by 16-character, backlit LCD display for status and menu information, and a little raised ‘crest’ behind, with status and warning LEDs embedded in it. The idea with this is that you can spot a printing problem from across the office, because the lights are raised above the surface of the printer.

The status lights are raised for improved visibility

It's good to see decent paper capacity in a workgroup printer: the FS-2020D takes a full, 500-sheet ream at a time, which means not only less frequent maintenance, but also that you have fewer half-used packs of paper lying around. Selling a workgroup machine, as other makers do, which can only load 250-300 sheets at a time seems cynical, misguided and designed only to encourage sales of extra trays.

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.

Printing duplex, a standard feature of the FS-2020D, saw a speed of 14.6 sides per minute, which is fair compared with other workgroup machines in the same price bracket.

The step-up-and-print USB port is conveniently positioned

Print quality is good, with light, but well-formed text, right down to small point sizes. Greyscale graphics for graphs and charts show a good range of tones, though fills are slightly uneven, giving some shades a mottled appearance. Our photo test print also exhibited this blotchiness and some minor banding across the height of our landscape image. Both graphics and photos are usable, but we have seen better greys from competitor machines.

As toner is the only consumable, you might think Kyocera Mita machines would be vastly cheaper to run than printers that require new photoconductor drums at regular intervals. It depends on how much the company charges for its toner, of course, but in this case running costs are very low.

With a 12,000-page cartridge costing around £85, the cost per page comes out at 0.70p including VAT. If you look at machines like Lexmark's T650DN, which has a page cost of 1.07p, or the Xerox Phaser 3435, which costs 0.97p per page, there's a considerable saving to be had.

The FS-2020D comes with a two-year warranty as standard and guarantees the drum for three years or 300,000 pages, whichever comes sooner.

Verdict

This is a good, general-purpose office printer, geared well to small workgroups, apart from the lack of a network connection. It's very cheap to run, prints at good speed and produces excellent text and reasonable graphics print. Simple maintenance should keep the running costs down, though the asking price for the printer itself is higher than some of its rivals. ®

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