Kyocera FS-800 review

A t 237mm, the Kyocera FS-800 stands quite tall on the desk.

Its bulky 150-sheet paper tray has an integral single sheet manual or bypass feed, but seems very light for something of its bulk, and appears, at first glance to be quite flimsy. Yet once in position, it's more than sturdy enough to cope. It will also accept various paper sizes - no need to buy extra trays for different sheet sizes. This printer screams quality.

The paper path is S-shaped, sheets being pulled forward from the tray, back on themselves through the print process and then back again to exit from the top of the machine in the 150-sheet output tray. To the right of the tray sits a neat LCD panel. This tells the user what application sent the document currently being printed, as well as the interface used, the resolution, size of paper and number of copies. While probably superfluous to the single user, this kind of information is invaluable in a network setting.

The control panel is comprehensive, with buttons for most things, but, in our tests, we had no need to access it at all.

The documentation provided with the FS-800 is exemplary, covering every detail the user might need. The supplied CD offers two installation options: a standard PCL5 driver and/or PostScript emulation - our advice would be to install both, since the printer switches between the two automatically. And it's useful to have the extra accuracy of PostScript for jobs like our newsletter, the quality of which was amongst the best we've seen.

The first print of all took some time to come through, as the printer sorted its internals out, but all output after that was printed well within a minute. Text-only documents from word processors were almost immediate. The printer's speed is impressive all round, especially given the quality of final output, particularly in PostScript mode. The LCD panel, although not vitally important, is useful for confirming what Windows doesn't tell you about a print job. In short, as any good printer ought to, the FS-800 gets on with its job and doesn't intrude on what you're doing - PC release time is fast, and the machine is quiet.

Output is very good - blacks are definitely black and, in PostScript mode, graphics are excellently rendered. This sort of output wouldn't embarrass you in front of a wider audience. After the first print, further copies hit the output tray at the machine's rated eight pages per minute.

You wouldn't usually worry about PostScript emulation in a printer, but at a price this close to run-of-the-mill PCL-based printers, it's more or less a giveaway. The FS-800 is a workhorse of a printer, easily capable of 8,000 pages per month, and has enough bells and whistles to distinguish it from a fairly dull crowd.