EPSON AcuLaser C1100 review

Hot on the heels of the AcuLaser C3000, reviewed in What's New, Shopper March 2005, comes Epson's new C1100.

It's a host-based, four-pass colour laser with claimed print speeds of 25 mono pages per minute (ppm) and 5ppm in colour.

The C1100 is reasonably large for a four-pass printer, thanks in part to the tall multipurpose tray that's built into its base. The tray's 180-sheet capacity seems small given the unit's height, but you can expand the printer with an optional 500-sheet unit.

The C1100 is harder to set up than many colour lasers we've tested. It's shipped without its consumables in place and with a multitude of packing to remove before you can install them. Unusually, we had to refer to the quick start sheet to work out how to fit the photoconductor and toners. By contrast, installing Epson's driver is straightforward. It has a simple interface with useful multi-page and manual duplexing support.

We were disappointed by the AcuLaser C3000's print quality, but the C1100's output was excellent in our tests. Black text was decent at the Fast setting, and the Fine setting produced very good text, greyscales, graphics and photos.

The speeds Epson quotes for the C1100 are very competitive for a budget printer, and it came commendably close to them in our tests. Both our 50-page mono documents were printed at 23.8ppm, while our taxing 24-page mixed-colour document appeared at 4.6ppm. Two 10x8" photographs printed on A4 paper took 41 seconds, and six 6x4" images on three pages of A4 just over a minute.

Computer Shopper's tests involve printing at least 130 pages, but we usually print more to get the clearest picture of a printer's performance. Although we installed unused, standard-capacity consumables in the C1100, it was the first printer we've seen that warned us that the black toner was low before we'd finished our basic tests.

We were concerned that the toner might fall well short of its rated 1,500 pages, but we were able to print a total of nearly 1,100 sides before the printer declared the black toner empty. This seems a reasonable yield for our mix of text and graphical jobs.

The AcuLaser C1100 costs about the same to buy and run as Konica Minolta's 2430w, and the network versions of both are also similarly priced. The C1100 is bigger and annoyingly tricky to set up, but its print quality is better and it's significantly faster in mono printing.