printer and another guide

Kyocera Mita FS 4000dn

The first of two things you really pay for in a laser printer is speed, the second is print quality. If you want a fast printer, with the ability to share it across a network, there is often a considerable price premium. The FS-4000DN from Kyocera Mita is rated at 45 pages per minute and will serve any workgroup. Well.

The design is conventional enough, a cube shaped device with a sloping control panel at the front. It includes a backlit 2 line display and an panel of eight buttons.

Five hundred sheets of paper can fit into the FS-4000DNs main paper tray and there is also a fold-down multi-purpose tray which can take a further 100 sheets of paper, envelopes and other odd shaped media.

If this isn’t enough there is also the option to expand paper handling, a cabinet and memory upgrades.

Printer manufacturers always seem to rate their machines by printing documents in draft mode. This means their headline figures should be taken with a small pinch of salt. Draft mode is perfectly acceptable, and often used in office situations for proofing and checking before beginning a large print run. The fastest print speed we achieved in normal print mode was 14 pages per minute, less than a third of the claimed top speed. Using the built-in duplexer we produced a two-sided document at 23 sides per minute, closer to the claimed speed of 33.5 pages per minute.

The print quality is fine for text print, which is proper black and precise, the same can be said for photos and business graphics. In both cases the results were detailed enough for almost any use. They won’t win prizes, but they are plenty good enough for a laser printer. If you want to print photographs and business graphics, you would be shopping for an inkjet not a laser.

The Kyocera drum design means it’s a lifetime part and will never need changing. The only consumable other than paper will be toner, which lasts 20,000 pages per high yield cartridge. That will set you back around $50, which makes the cost per page ridiculously low.

While the Kyocera Mita FS-4000dn might not be the obvious choice for a busy office, the brand is known for its reliability. They are well designed, well built office machines. That’s why the brand is so popular.