Kyocera Mita Ecosys FS-1300D review

Kyocera's Ecosys FS-1300D is designed for simplicity.

A multi-coloured LED ring clearly indicates status issues such as paper jams and low toner levels, and there are just two buttons: Start and Cancel. After we first installed the toner cartridge, the printer took about 15 minutes to charge the imaging drum. This consumes around half of the toner's 7,200-page supply, but happens only once in the printer's lifetime.

The latest version of Kyocera's installer is clear and easy to use and successfully auto-detected the printer, but it didn't automatically set it as the default printer. The standard paper tray can take up to 250 pages of A4, while a multipurpose tray pulls out from the front of the printer to take envelopes, non-standard formats, or 50 additional sheets of standard A4. Most items from the multipurpose tray printed cleanly, but envelopes came out slightly crumpled.

Although its greyscale prints of graphs, diagrams and illustrations were generally good, the FS-1300D fared poorly in our photo-quality image test. Fortunately, it's a good-quality text printer, with a reasonably fast integrated duplexer. There are three standard quality options: Draft, Proof and High, while a Custom menu allows you to set resolutions up to the full 1,200x1,200dpi. At the highest resolution, even the tiniest font sizes were extremely sharp and clear. At that resolution, 25 pages of mono text took the same time to print as they did in our 600dpi speed test, at 22.7ppm. We didn't have to wait long for our first print, either, with a mono page emerging in 14 seconds. Duplex prints at normal quality printed at a fairly quick 12ppm.

What sets the FS-1300D apart in a market full of similar mono laser printers are its extremely affordable print costs. At just 0.82p per page it's one of the most economical printers we've seen, although it isn't quite as cheap to run as the slower FS-1030D (reviewed in Shopper 233), which costs 0.75p per page. There are no other consumables, and the photoconductor drum is guaranteed to last for three years or 100,000 pages.

Although this printer is best suited for personal use in a small or home office, there are plenty of options available to expand its capabilities. You can fit two extra paper trays for a maximum capacity of 800 sheets, and memory can be expanded to 544MB. A network card is also available.

Although its image printing is mediocre, producing banded, grainy results on our high-resolution photo images, the FS-1300D did print clear text and usable charts and diagrams. At well under a penny per page, it stands out as an ideal choice if your running costs are paramount.