Kyocera Mita FS-920 review

Kyocera's FS-920 is a compact, sturdy and affordable mono laser printer that takes up only slightly more space than an inkjet.

It has both USB Hi-Speed and parallel ports, so it'll work with both new and legacy systems. It has a 266MHz processor and 32MB of RAM, which can be upgraded to a maximum of 288MB. A single, large input tray can hold up to 250 sheets of A4 paper. Printed pages are ejected on top of the printer and an extendable clip pulls out to hold up to 100 pages.

The FS-920 comes with a toner cartridge that will last for around 3,000 pages. You can buy replacements containing enough toner for 2,000 or 6,000 pages. High-yield cartridges are better value for money and we've used this to calculate page costs.

Fitting the drum and starter toner was a hassle-free experience, but when the printer is first switched on you have to wait 15 minutes while it puts toner in its developer reservoir. Fortunately, this process occurs only once and is not repeated during future drum changes.

Installing the drivers was complicated and required us to select which model of printer we wanted to install and which set of drivers we wanted to use. The recommended Windows driver provides full support for the PCL 6 and PostScript 3 page description languages, and there's support for the FS-920 under both Mac OS X and Linux. However, if you're using Windows Vista, you'll have to download a specific driver from Kyocera's website.

Print speeds were around 17ppm at all quality settings. This is a touch slow considering that Samsung's ML-2510 costs £58 and can manage over 22ppm. Draft prints were readable but noticeably pale. Printing them consumed less toner than higher-quality modes. Both proof and high-quality print modes produced dark, clear text. Although there wasn't much to differentiate between them, proof quality produced more consistent prints. High-quality prints were prone to some smudging and fuzziness around bold characters.

The FS-920 wasn't very successful as a greyscale image printer. Large dark areas were covered with pale flecks, while lighter areas were grainy and speckled. Some images suffered from horizontal or vertical striping and banding, and shaded areas were banded and poorly graduated.

Unlike most laser printers, there are no hidden costs in running the FS-920. The drum, developer and fuser are all guaranteed for three years or 100,000 pages, and toner is the only consumable. While this low-cost durability is an advantage, most home and home office users are unlikely to print enough pages to appreciate the economic advantages of this printer. If you want to use the printer over a network, an optional Ethernet adaptor is available for £88.

The problem with this printer is that it sits between Lexmark's E250dn, which has faster print speeds and a network port, and Samsung's ML-2510, which is cheaper and faster but lacks a network port. Therefore, we can't recommend it.