Kyocera FS-1000 review

The Kyocera's cubic design is actually strangely attractive.

It sits neatly on your desk, and remains pretty quiet even while printing. Kyocera also makes a selling point of its environmentally-friendly toner and manufacturing policies, but we'll leave your conscience and wallet to fight over that.

Ease of use

Kyocera makes its printers easy to use by making them so basic that there are next to no options to mess up. That said, we'd have liked to see something friendlier than the 'readme' text file you get as the installation guide.

To beginners, it's not always obvious where to look for help. Otherwise, the FS-1000 is very straightforward to use.

Print quality

On the whole, the Kyocera is very good. Text looks perfect, and photos are spot-on too. However, the driver had trouble discerning levels of grey, resulting in the loss of fine lines in the backgrounds of our graph test prints. On the whole, though, Kyocera's Image Refinement system, which works automatically in the background, does a good job. If you're after a printer with good all-round print quality, this is up there with the best.

Performance

As with the LaserJet 1200, speed is inconsistent, but this time it was the plain old Word document that suffered. While the printer knocked out challenging and good-looking CorelDraw pages in 30 seconds, it took the FS-1000 nearly 1min 45sec to handle five extremely basic Word pages.

Overall

The slow printing of our Word document was the only performance blot on an otherwise first-rate printer. It's so far off the 12ppm rating we suspect a driver bug. If Kyocera fixes this problem and makes installation more user-friendly, it'll have a winner on its hands.

Author: Alistair Dabbs