Kyocera Mita FS-820 review

Kyocera Mita's FS-820 is another printer that has been around for some time.

It's the most expensive device in this test, its price having dropped by only £22 since our review in What's New, Shopper June 2005. Although the FS-820 is the biggest printer here, its arched shape and smart plastics make it one of the best looking.

Though this printer is the most expensive to buy, it's one of the cheapest to run. The drum is guaranteed for three years or 100,000 pages, so even heavy users won't need to replace it. A starter cartridge is supplied, but its 3,000-page yield is greater than all but the Samsung ML-2510's standard supplies. Replacement toner costs about £60 and lasts for 6,000 pages, making this printer cheap and simple to maintain.

Unfortunately, the FS-820 is the hardest device to set up. The first job is to install the toner, which can be tricky to lock into place, but the real horror is in the complex and unfriendly install program. The software asked us to choose the printer from others in the range, then choose a driver type. With this done, we had to select the printer for a second time from a Windows Add Printer dialog.

Rather than just prompting us to plug in the printer's USB cable, we had to choose a port to use for the printer. At this stage we chose to abandon the installation, connect the USB cable and simply point Windows to the drivers on Kyocera Mita's install disc.

Once we finally got it running, the FS-820 proved to be a quiet but slow printer. Only the Canon LBP-3000 and HP LaserJet 1018 were significantly slower in our text tests, and the FS-820 was easily the slowest when printing our mixed-colour document. Dropping the print quality to Proof knocked just over a minute off its overall time, but still left it the slowest.

Author: Simon Handby