Kyocera FS C5030N

Author's product rating:   

Picture quality	Excellent
Printing speed	Fast
Colour sensitivity	Good
Ease of use	Easy
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Very reliable, low cost per page
Disadvantages:	None

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I bought first Kyocera FS 5030N for my company at February 2007. After six months we own another four of those. It shows how satisfied I am with quality of that product.

First quick description.

It's medium speed (24 pages per minute), color (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK), laser printer with network interface (letter N on the end of a product name). It prints with same speed for B/W and color documents. Maximum print resolution is 600x600dpi.
It warms up in 80sec from power on, time to first page is 12sec. Inside sits processor PowerPC 750FX/600MHz with 128MB RAM, expandable to 1024MB.
It has smallest footprint (35x47x39cm) in its class. Offers very easy access to toners and waste toner tank. Each toner stands for printing 8k pages (in lab conditions of course, in real those numbers highly depends on average page coverage), which is more than any other printer in that class. Black toner cost around £55, color around £80.
Standard paper feeder has capacity of 500 sheets (60-105g/m2, A4, B5, A5, Letter and custom 148x210 to 216x356mm), manual feeder takes up to 100 sheets (60-200g/m2, A4 B5, A5, Letter, Legal, Custom 70x148 - 216x297mm).
It has unique type ceramic drum (Kyocera patent) which makes it last lifetime of printer. It makes maintenance much easier job (no need for drum replacing) and significantly reduces cost of printing.
It's maximum average duty cycle is (according to producer) 15000 pages per month, although it can take much more.
It has wide range of accessories improving its (already impressive) performance: duplex unit (a must have in office environment), three additional paper feeders (each takes up to 500 sheets), power envelope feeder, hard drive, compact flash memory, high capacity output tray.
Kyocera has one more ace in its sleeve - drivers. Imagine that they developed one super-driver for all printers/copiers they produce. That way once you installed any Kyocera printer, you can add more and don't care about driver; it's already there.

And now from my experience with FS 5030N.

We use 5030DN models (network interface plus duplex unit). No problems what so ever. Never failed. Installation is dead easy, just like with the rest of Kyocera products. Paper jams are very rare and in most cases are human related (average user can't understand, that you are suppose to put paper into tray neatly, and not just throw it in). Great, economic color printer forworkgroup use.