In modern buisiness, as with newspapers in the last 15 years, Colour is creeping more and more into our printed documents. No longer will Black Ink on a white page suffice. Now it is expected that printing sould be multicolour or your print outs will look dated.
It was with this in mind that my department were set the task of finding a suitable Colour Laser printer that was great quality, affordable and reliable.
With this brief in mind, It was the Epson AcuLaser C4100 that we settled on.
However, it still has good and bad points as I will discuss. Firstly, lets look at.......
It is big! that is one thing that will strike you and heavy too! It will need a good sturdy desk to support its weight. Most office printers nowadays with additional Paper bins are big but this one is massive! We also have monochrome Lexmarks in the office and this is much wider, deeper and heavier than these and it does not have an additional paper tray yet!
Connectivity is good. It has built in LAN support so you can just clip it into your network via a network cable. You can also run it from a standalone PC as it has a Parallel connection too. Setting it up on either the network or PC is very simple as it includes all set up CDs and simple instructions.
It is supplied with 1 built in paper tray and of course a flip down paper feed. This allows manual feeds such as photo paper to be used. Great for "one off" jobs. With an additional paper tray, it has the capacity to take up to 1600 sheets of A4. It also has a handy gadget inside the paper tray for printing on A5! Very userful for smaller documents and photos!
The display and menu facilities on the machine are great. The small but easy to use LCD screen is very informative and the instructions supplied explain all you would need to know with set up.
Performance? Well, Im absolutely astounded by this! It prints as quick as a monochrome laser printer! It truly does! For example, I printed out a picture from a web page. No sooner had I pressed print than it was in action. I thought to myself....."Ah it must be warming up or getting ready." Then the page appeared! All within about 10 seconds! I could not believe it! I figured maybe there was an error. But no. It worked beautifully. The speed of the machine is down to the lasers inside. Apparently, it runs on 4 individual lasers, 1 for each colour. This increases the speed by 4 times over individual laser machines.
The quality? Well, that matches the speed! Superb. The resolution of the print is fantastic. No blurs...No fades.... Just grat colours. Photographs come out on this machine like they have come straight from Boots! Its a welcome addition to any office where colour printing is essential such as marketing.
The machine has a couple of nice features added in too. One of these is the ability to duplex print. This means printing on both sides of one sheet of paper. The built in technology makes this possible and also prevents you having to send the paper through twice manually.
Having separate Black Toners to the colours means you can use this as a Black and White printer in the office without the need for a second printer. The Black toners that is uses are no more expensive than monochrome printer toners as they are the same thing. The Colour toners however are more expensive. This printer has 3 colour toners. They are MAGENTA, CYAN and YELLOW. These retail for £175 on line at www.theconsumablesdepot.com.
Extras? Well, this is where it gets expensive. True, £175 is a lot for a Toner cartridge, particularly when you are buying 3 of them at once. At least having them individual you can replace one colour at a time and not waste 2 if they have some left.
The Paper Trays that clip onto the bottom of the machine are very expensive. They start at £500 and go up to over £1000! This depends on the capacity of the paper needed. In some environments, more than one tray is needed (headed paper in one, plain in another) so this makes it an expensive option. To avoid this, we have headed paper in a monochrome printer and just plain in our C4100!
Purchase Price for the printer? Well, its not cheap. We paid £1,150 for our printer.
Overall, it is a great printer. It does a great job and quickly.It may be expensive for consumables and additional paper trays but this can be overlooked thanks to its great performance. A winner in my office!
More details
Reliability
Excellent
Design
Good
Range of extra features / functions
Good
Instruction manual
Good
Manufacturer Support
Good
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