Kyocera FS-920

Few manufacturers can match Kyocera for overall cost of ownership. The company's ECOSYS technology means this printer is quiet, low-maintenance and has low ongoing costs. Add a low price, reasonable print speeds and quality output, and you have a personal mono laser worth attention.

The FS-920 is a surprisingly heavy-duty and robust model with options that include a network interface and memory upgrade to 288MB. It has a resolution of 1800 x 600dpi, and we managed to get it printing on draft text at 17ppm (pages per minute). Not too shoddy, and only a page slower than Kyocera's claimed speed.

We're also happy to report that there's little slowdown on jobs with mixed text and graphics when you bump up the quality. We even managed to print out a high-res A4 BMP image on best quality in 16 seconds. We didn't suffer any paper jams--though the printer's internals are easy to access so you should be able to retrieve stuck sheets without any problems.

At this price you're not going to get an LCD menu, although the FS-920 does have two hardware buttons and an internal 250-page input tray.

Kyocera sensibly sits the output tray a good couple of centimetres higher than the rest of the printer, so finished pages don't push off the ones that have already been delivered.

As expected on a mono laser, shading tends to look a bit mottled, but text and graphics on high quality are sharp.