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Print times depend very much on whether the printer’s been in power saving mode. If so, it takes around one minute 15 seconds to warm up before printing starts. After that, you’ll get a five page text document in just over half a minute and a page of mixed text and colour business graphics in just 23 seconds. Our 5 x 3in photo took 26 seconds, the same time it took to copy our text and graphics page from the scanner.

Print quality is good, though not up with the leaders in colour laser technology. The latest Canon engine, for example, as used in HP’s Colour LaserJet 2820, did a much more accurate job of printing our test photo. The colours here are all too vivid, making it look a little like a retouched postcard. You can modify the output with the colour matching utility, or course, but it would be good to have something closer to lifelike from the start.

The price of the C5510MFP is higher than its main rivals, so you might hope to recoup some of that in consumable costs. There are a lot of parts that need periodic replacement on this machine, with the toner cartridges lasting 3,000 pages – 5,000 pages for the high yield versions – the drums going for 17,000 pages, the fuser lasting 45,000 pages and the transfer belt a whopping 150,000 pages. You might well consider the transfer belt a lifetime component, and it only makes a cost difference of around 0.05p per page, anyway.

Adding up all the costs gives a five per cent black page cost of 1.73p and a 20 per cent colour page cost of 8.25p. The black cost is good, as low as many mono-only lasers, but the colour cost is around 0.75p per page higher than the HP Color LaserJet 2820.

Verdict

The C5510MFP feels like a serious piece of business equipment, despite the rather messy cabling at the back. Extra features, such as its built-in network connection and ability to send scanned documents to IP addresses will be useful in a networked business and paper handling options are better than either its Epson or HP rivals.

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