Kyocera Mita Ecosys FS-1000+ review

The Kyocera FS-1000+ is the successor to the FS-1000, which has enjoyed a six-month stay in our Top 50 Best Buys thanks to its speed and print quality.

With this in mind, I was interested to find out if the newcomer could match the predecessor's winning ways.

On paper, the FS-1000+ gets off to a romping start, thanks to an increase in print speed from a claimed 10 pages per minute to 12ppm. Good stuff. Sadly, though, Kyocera hasn't seen fit to add a USB connector to its new machine, preferring instead to leave the new printer with an old-style parallel port. This won't hurt performance, but USB is far easier to set up than a potentially fiddly parallel port, which may even require a foray into your BIOS to make sure it's set to the right mode.

As standard, the printer comes equipped with 4Mb memory for storing page images. The more complex the document, the more RAM you'll need. As it stands, the printer is more than capable of managing even complex composite documents, like our benchmarks, for instance. If you fancy adding more RAM - and it's unlikely that you'll need to unless you're printing multiple copies of complex DTP documents - another 16Mb will cost £75. (If you're really stuck for something to spend cash on, you can actually buy an extra 128Mb, which costs around £15 more then actual printer itself!)

With a 250-page input tray, and a 150-page multipurpose tray too, you shouldn't need to refill the FS-1000+ too often. If your printing needs are more demanding, a second 250-sheet feeder can be purchased separately.

Across its range of printers, Kyocera always makes a big deal of its environmentally-friendly Ecosys system. By having a separate toner reservoir and drum, Kyocera claims it can reduce waste in the environment. Sadly, this particular printer has a combined toner and drum unit. Don't worry, though, as this only needs to be replaced after a whopping 6,000 pages - this compares favourably with an average life of 3,500 pages in last May's group test.

Indeed, given that the Kyocera's drum and toner kit costs £45, a page's worth of toner costs just 0.8p. You can't complain about that unless you're an obsessive penny pincher. And if you are such a person, the driver has a toner saving mode, which will reduce the price per page further. Don't consider using it on very important documents, though, as it does markedly reduce print quality.

Beyond this function, it's a shame that the driver is so basic - lacking options such as scaling and multiple pages per sheet. The only upside to this lack of fancy functions is that it does make the printer easy to use. In the same vein, I was pleased to find a 'print cancel' button on the front panel, a particularly useful inclusion.

Next came speed testing. Printing a 30-page text-only document took 161 seconds, which equates to a shade over 11ppm - almost matching Kyocera's claims. The first page took a disappointing 22 seconds to appear, though, which will be frustrating if most of your documents are just one or two pages long.

To test performance with trickier documents, I printed an 11-page Adobe Acrobat manual. The printer found this hard going, slowing to a dismal 5.2ppm. An equally complex 12-page Excel workbook was printed fairly swiftly for a printer at this price. I clocked it at just under 9ppm.

Sadly, print quality was not universally excellent. While text quality was practically faultless, greyscales weren't handled well. Shaded gradients weren't at all smooth, with stepping and banding clearly visible on the page. That said, photos looked fine and business graphics such as bar graphs were also handled well. Spreadsheets proved really problematic. Shaded backgrounds in particular were converted to a dark grey, making the overlaid text unreadable.