Epson AcuLaser C1100 review

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Verdict:

The C1100 produces great results if you don't mind experimenting with the driver. Although itfs not too fast in colour, it prints black text very quickly. Reasonable running costs make it an affordable printer to own, particularly if you'll print in high volumes, but its price hasn't fallen much since it was new. These days it seems expensive compared with the Canon and Konica Minolta printers, so it misses out on an award in this Labs test.

Review Date: 15 Mar 2007

Price when reviewed: inc. VAT

Reviewed By: Simon Handby

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

In the world of colour lasers, Epson's AcuLaser C1100 has been around for a long time.

It has been on Shopper's 'Also consider' list since we first reviewed it in April 2005, and it won Best Printer in our 2006 awards issue (Shopper December 2006). Although it's bigger than printers such as Konica Minolta's Magicolor 2500W it's still fairly basic, with just a single 180-sheet paper input.

Epson ships the C1100 without its toners in place, so it requires more setting up than the other printers here. The printer has a carousel, which has to rotate into position before you can insert each of the 1,500-page starter supplies. High-yield replacements are comparatively affordable and last for 4,000 pages, so the C1100 is one of the cheapest printers here to run.

The C1100 is a four-pass printer, so it can't keep up with the single-pass devices in this test when printing in colour. Its quoted speed for mono prints is the second-highest here, though, and it was only 3ppm slower than Dell's Colour Laser 3110cn in our tests. It was also particularly quick to print the first copy of our formal letter, even when waking up from its sleep mode.

We've always been impressed with the quality of the C1100fs colour output, but we struggled to get the best results from it in this test. Colours were less accurate than we expected with the driver's defaults, so we had to experiment with the settings to match the high quality we've seen before. We were finally happy with our results using the Vivid Colour setting. Black text was fine at any quality.

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