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Kyocera Mita claims a print speed of 24ppm in both black and white and colour. It took us 28 seconds to print our five-page text document in normal mode, which equates to around 11ppm. That’s not a bad result, as draft printing is normally considerably faster.

On its web site, Kyocera Mita specifically says this printer is intended for office and business printing and is not for graphics professionals. We'd agree with this analysis, as text print is very clean and precise, with a slight sheen to characters. When you add colour, in the form of block graphics or coloured text, you still get a very vivid result with good, dense colours placed accurately on the paper.

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When you come to colour photographs, though, while they’re good enough for something like house or motor particulars, or perhaps for advertising flyers, they don't have the presence or accuracy needed for artistic proofs. Colours from the latest HP machines, for example, have a lot more life.

As with most Kyocera Mita printers, the only running cost is the toner. Although a toner cartridge for the FS-C5030N isn’t cheap, it prints 8,000 pages at five per cent cover, which equates to only 1.25p for a black page and 4.86p for a 20 per cent colour one.

This is quite a bit lower than from most of the colour lasers we’ve looked at recently. Most are up around 2p a page for black and 8p a page for colour. If you’re saving around 3p per colour page, the break-even point against some of the cheaper colour lasers would be around 25,000 pages, well within the lifecycle of this machine. While you’re reaching that point, you’re printing faster on a printer with more scope for expansion.

Verdict

The FS-C5030N is aimed at the workgroup market, but is sufficiently expandable to be able to take you from a small working unit to a substantial department, simply by adding extra resources, such as paper trays. Although the asking price may appear high, it's this flexibility, combined with substantially lower running costs than those of cheaper colour lasers, which make it attractive. Print quality and speed are bonuses in this equation and overall it represents a very cost-effective package.

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