Verdict

Pros

• Duplex scan, copy and print
• Very low running costs
• Low power standby mode

Cons

• Slow warmup can take 30s
• Doesn't wake up on touching touchscreen
• Heavyweight machine, not easy to move

Workgroup-level colour printer-photocopiers aren’t cheap. The FS-C2526MFP from Kyocera Mita costs over £1,200, but it does come with all the features you might expect of a core office multifunction.

It’s a wide machine, because of its big, sideways mounted scanner, and deep, because of the inline configuration of its laser engine. The 50-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) has an intermediate tray directly below its feed tray, as this is a duplex device. When you scan or copy a duplex document, each sheet appears briefly in the intermediate tray before its second side is scanned.

The main control panel is also deep, though this leaves a lot of room for a well laid out set of controls. In the centre is a 110mm colour touchscreen, but even with this control device, there are groups of physical buttons to its left and right.

To the left are specialist buttons for copying and sending documents, and on the right there’s a numeric pad and buttons to start and stop scan and copy jobs. The power button is used more frequently than on some machines, to wake up the print engine and the touchscreen. On most machines, touching the touchscreen is enough to wake it.

Below the control panel is a USB socket, which will take a USB drive and enable graphics and document files to be printed, though it’s not compatible with PictBridge.

The main scanner section hinges up and back to provide access to the four toner cartridges, which plug-in under the top cover of the laser printer. Because of Kyocera Mita’s long life photoconductor drum, the only running cost is the toner cartridges and these have long service lives of 6,000 pages for colour and 7,000 pages for black.

The main paper tray can take up to 250 sheets and you can fit one or two optional trays each of 500 sheets, if you need a great capacity. There’s a 50-sheet multipurpose tray available when you hinge down the printer’s front cover.

Software is straightforward with PCL and PreScribe drivers, and Kyocera Mita supports Windows, OS X and several Linux and UNIX distributions.

Kyocera Mita rates the FS-C2526MFP at 26ppm in both black and colour print. We couldn’t get near that, even with our longer, 20-page black text document, which came through at 18.2ppm. Most office documents average around five pages, though, and our tests gave 9.6ppm in black and 8.6ppm in colour.

The discrepancy is mainly down to the warm-up time required by the printer before it starts printing. This can be as long as 30s and even though we’d primed each run by printing a separate page, it was regularly over 20s before paper started to feed.

Printing duplex tests gave a slightly higher throughput at 10.9 sides per minute, so you could happily set this as the default and save paper costs. The device is considerably quicker when copying, producing a single page colour copy from the flatbed in 11s and a five-page, black text copy from the ADF in twice this time.

A 15 x 10cm photo printed on A4 took 22s from a PC and 20s from a USB drive. A 10 side duplex copy from the ADF completed in 59s.

The quality of print is generally good, with crisp text from its 600dpi engine and readable results when in toner-saving Eco-mode. Colour print is bright and solid, well suited to business graphics and doing a pretty good job with photo prints, too. There’s little sign of banding and colour gradations are generally smooth.

The only consumable you have to buy is toner, so the running costs are low. At the best price we could find, a black page should cost you around 2.1p, with an equivalent colour page coming through at 6.7p. These figures compare very well with, for example, the https://www.trustedreviews.com/Brother-MFC-9970CDW_Printer_review Brother MFC-9970CDW, which gave 2.8p and 10.7p, respectively, though the Brother machine is considerably cheaper to buy.

Verdict
Having the ability to produce quick and easy duplex prints and copies in full colour can make a big difference to the productivity of an office. The Kyocera Mita FS-C2526MFP certainly does this and its well laid out touchscreen control panel also offers useful features such as identity card copy and the ability to set up favourite print configurations which can be accessed with a couple of presses. It’s not a cheap product, but some of that purchase price will be made back through its low running costs.

Trusted Score