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The printer driver itself is quite basic, with no support for watermarks, overlays or multiple pages per sheet. A copy of PaperPort 9 Deluxe is included though, so you have both document management and OCR facilities. There's also QLink, a software-based control panel lookalike for your Windows desktop.

Kyocera Mita has worked hard on the copying facilities of this machine. As well as being able to collate pages as complete documents or with all copies of each page together, you can combine two or four pages scanned through the ADF onto a single output sheet, which can be very convenient.

The company quotes speeds of up to 16 pages per minute, but our five-page text print took 43 seconds to complete, which equates to just under 7ppm. The text and graphics print was slightly quicker, at just 36 seconds, or 8.3ppm, but this is still only just over half the quoted figure. Our photographic print took 27 seconds, around 2ppm. Again, copying is one of the FS-1116MFP's strengths, and it took 16 seconds and 18 seconds respectively to copy a page from the scanner glass and from the ADF.

Print quality is generally good, with clear, light characters, but sufficient depth of black where necessary to give a good impression. Business graphics output is also above-average for a mono laser. Text printed over greyscales is readable though tints are a little banded.

Greyscales in our photographic print are also fair, though the comparatively low 600dpi resolution leaves printed output looking obviously dotty. Copying printed pages produces strange print effects, rather like moiré patterns, in areas that should be smooth tone; this is more obvious in copies from the ADF than from the glass.

There's just one consumable needed to keep this multi-function device running and that's toner. Cartridges are available in two capacities, for 2000 and 6000, 5 per cent pages. Using the higher capacity cartridge, we calculate a page cost of 1.74p, including 0.7p for a sheet of A4, plain paper. This isn't that good for a mono laser engine, with recently tested printers from Dell and Lexmark beating it by two or three pence per sheet.

Verdict

This is a neat and serviceable multi-function device, which requires very little maintenance and integrates all the main business functions into one, small-footprint device. Print output is good, though copying can be patchy and, surprisingly for Kyocera Mita, it's not the cheapest machine in its class to run.

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