Epson AcuLaser C2600N review

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Verdict:

The C2600N is hard to install and its PostScript performance is poor, but it's cost effective and robust. Its price has fallen significantly since we last reviewed it and, at under £500, it's great value if you don't need PostScript printing.

Review Date: 22 May 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Alan Lu

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

ExpertReviews Award

Review
Specs

We first reviewed Epson's AcuLaser C2600N in What's New, Shopper September 2005.

It's available in two versions. The C2600N reviewed here comes with a 5,000-page black toner and 2,000-page colour toners. The 2600N, which costs just a few pounds less, is identical but has no colour toners.

Either version can run with four colour toners or four black toners. With four black toners, the C2600N can print up to 20,000 mono pages without further maintenance.

The C2600N is one of the smaller printers in this group, but its compact four-pass engine leaves room for a full 500-sheet input cassette. The multipurpose tray can hold a further 150 sheets, although the printer creased envelopes even when we fed them in one at a time.

Like the AcuLaser C4100 reviewed on page 100, the C2600N is hard to install. We couldn't get Epson's Easy Install program to detect our notebook's wired Ethernet adaptor, let alone the printer. We resorted to installing the C2600N on a parallel port, creating a TCP/IP port manually and reassigning the printer to it.

Using its PCL driver, the C2600N was fast when printing text documents, and acceptably swift in colour. Our high-resolution photos looked great, with the most accurate colours of the group. Colour business graphics looked fine.

For PostScript printing, we had to add a new printer manually, assign it to the network port we had created and point Windows to the driver on Epson's disk. The C2600N's PostScript performance left us wondering if it was worth the effort. Colour prints looked a little dark and sombre, and mono text often printed with tiny but visible notches on the top or bottom of loops. Twice the printer failed to complete our 50-page test due to a memory overflow error.

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