Epson AcuLaser C2600N review

Epson describes its AcuLaser 2600N as a convertible laser printer.

Though it's a four-pass device, it has a black-only mode where its cyan, magenta and yellow toners can be removed or even replaced with additional black supplies. If there is black toner in all four slots, the printer can produce 20,000 pages without re-stocking.

Four-pass print engines create full-colour pages by separately printing overlapping black, cyan, magenta and yellow images. Though they print colour slowly they tend to print mono pages fast. Because of its highly specified engine, the C2600N can print a speedy 30 black pages per minute (ppm).

The AcuLaser is smaller than its huge box suggests. Setting it up entails removing some tape, locking the photoconductor into place and inserting each toner. Unusually, this is done lengthways from the side of the printer's carousel.

Four-pass printers often make a lot of noise when rotating their carousel, but this printer is less clunky than most we have tested. Its range of standard emulations includes PCL6 and PostScript 3. Standard paper handling comprises a 500-sheet cassette and a 150-sheet multipurpose tray. The driver has no specific envelope paper type, though. Also, the AcuLaser crumpled and curled our test sheets. However, tested over its network interface the C2600N performed quickly in mono, printing our 50-page document at 26.6ppm. Given the shorter spool time of our 50-page letter test, this printer achieved a credible 27.5ppm. The first page printed in 11.5 seconds, but waking the printer from sleep mode added a minute to this time.

The AcuLaser is a bit slower than its single-pass competitors when printing in colour. It managed 6.9ppm printing our 24-page test document, but the Konica Minolta 5430DL reviewed in our Labs round-up of colour laser printers in Shopper February 2005 managed 15ppm in the same test.

Text quality and colour graphics were OK, but we found the driver reluctant to print at 600dpi unless selected manually. Graphics were great at the higher resolution and photos were exceptional, with accurate colours and excellent detail.

The C2600N offers a low mono cost of 1.25p per page, plus a high mono speed and large black toner capacity. It is an effective, if expensive, workgroup mono laser. It is also a very capable colour device. However, for heavy colour workloads we recommend a single-pass alternative.