Kyocera FS-1920

When it comes to the overall cost of ownership, there are few printer manufacturers that can match Kyocera's ability to look after the dollars. The FS-1920 is no exception.

Although the price of the printer makes the initial outlay expensive, with such low running costs the FS-1920 will soon pay for itself. It's a great solution for the printing needs of a mid-size workgroup thanks to its maximum duty cycle of 125,000 pages and 500-sheet input tray.

Despite its weight, the Kyocera is surprisingly compact. Setup is simple and we strongly recommend using the USB 2.0 connection if you want to produce speedy prints. Kyocera claims 28ppm (pages per minute) for the FS-1920, a figure which proved pretty accurate in our tests: even on high resolutions we managed 27ppm.

Print configurations are kept simple with a straightforward software driver, but you can opt to change every setting via the concise LCD menu that's nestled on the printer itself.

With a maximum resolution of 1800 x 600dpi (dots per inch), we expected this model to print crisp, dark text. We weren't disappointed. The quality on all text-based jobs was above average, and the FS-1920 even coped well with difficult shaded graphics on PowerPoint charts, exhibiting little slowdown when printing at higher resolutions.

Kyocera gets a big tick for its commitment to the environment. We were pleased to see longlife single-plastic consumables on the FS-1920--a feature that equates to minimal maintenance and lower cost of ownership as well as easy recycling of used components.