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It’s unusual to find a cheap laser printer with much scope for expansion, but Kyocera Mita’s FS-1370DN stands out from the crowd. It has an Ethernet port and automatic duplexer as standard, but a wireless interface is available as an option. Amazingly this costs more than the printer at £267, but other options such as a wooden storage desk or 250-sheet paper tray are more reasonable. Standard paper handling is better than most, with a 250-sheet cassette and a sturdy 50-sheet multipurpose feed.
You need to install this printer’s toner before printing for the first time, and we found this unusually hard. The consumable seemed so reluctant to fit that we had to double-check we had the right part. Finally we got the blue locking lever to engage, but not before dusting our hands with loose toner – which also made its way onto the first few print jobs.
Fortunately this isn’t something you’ll have to do often, with the starter cartridge lasting for a generous 2,300 pages and replacements managing a class-leading 7,200 prints. With no other consumables, each print from the FS-1370DN costs just 1.2p, giving it low ownership costs for those printing in medium or high volumes.
You’re unlikely to print from the Kyocera for the joy of it, though. While we can forgive its slightly soft text outlines, its graphics are simply poor. The dark areas of our black and white photograph were printed black, losing detail, while horizontal banding was quite evident along the page’s length. Other photographs seemed to have artificially high contrast, while business graphics were murky and lacked the sharpness of those from, say, Samsung’s ML-1685W. We experimented with various resolutions and options in the driver, but were unable to improve the results significantly.
Kyocera says that the FS-1370DN can print 35 pages per minute, but we managed 28.3ppm for text, and less than 19ppm for our 24-page mixed graphics document. While the print engine is fast, it paused regularly when printing graphics, contributing to the underwhelming results. To print envelopes you must set the paper size and scaling before pressing the green Go button to start printing, which is fiddly. Unless your only priority is the lowest possible print costs, there are better, cheaper options. Such as the Canon i-Sensys LBP6300dn
