Victoria's Blog

Kyocera FS-1035MFP Review

We print a lot of documents in our household – roughly six thousand pages a year.  When my previous employer decided to downsize, they got rid of a lot of furniture and equipment.  They were getting rid of a couple of printers, one being an HP LJ5 and I asked if I could take it.  We’d been having issues with the amount of prints being sent to the Canon IP5000 ink jet printer and the way the printer had to be accessed.  The Canon printer was connected to the network using a Netgear WGP606, but the number of times the printer wouldn’t respond started to get on everyone’s nerves…

I’d used HP for printing at work and was generally very happy to acquire it, especially for free!  It lived the remainder of its life in our sun lounge and probably printed over ten thousand prints while it worked.  The HP started to play up at the end of last year.  First of all it’d be a couple of pages here and there – 1 in 20.  They’d get crimped by the printer just at the end of the page.  At first it was a little wave, then it got worse and it’s finally been sent to the dump as it was becoming impossible to get good prints out of the printer.  The majority ended up jamming the printer and you’d have to stand next to it, pulling out the pages.  The HP probably died an early death because it was located in the sun lounge… Temperatures in the sun lounge the last two winters went below freezing.  It served us well though 🙂

So I had a task; Find a new printer – Now!  I had been given no requirements, other than the ones I wanted from it:

• It had to cope with our six thousand pages a year
• It had to be fast – one member of our family (who shall remain anonymous) hates to wait for things and gets very angry and technology if it takes longer than a few seconds
• It had to be cheap to run
• It had to be networked.
• It had to duplex – or be upgradable to duplex
• It had to scan documents – preferably to e-mail and a network drive

The key feature that isn’t listed above was colour.  Although colour is a nice to have, it’s not essential as the Canon (on its last legs) is capable of printing in colour.

I then spent about 50 hours researching which printer to get.  One useful website I used gave had different brands and printers along with the consumables.  This gave a very useful insight into how much it would cost to run longer term.  I narrowed my choice down to two printers.  One was a Kyocera and the other was the Epson WorkForce Pro WP-4545 DTWF.  I was torn between the two.  The Epson offered full colour and cheaper outlay, but there were less than 10 reviews online!  In the end I couldn’t take the risk of getting the Epson and decided on the Kyocera.

The main reasons why I chose the Kyocera FS-1035MFP:

• Cheap(ish) to run.  The default toner is quoted at seven thousand two hundred pages and costs a little over £80.  Which means that each page is roughly 1.25 pence.  Also the Kyocera doesn’t need any significant replacements (drum, belt, etc.) until it’s done two hundred thousand pages.
• I’d used a Kyocera before, as long as you follow the toner replacement guide on cleaning the printer, they are pretty reliable.
• It has an auto document feeder on top which allows us to scan files to either our PCs or a network share.
• It has a duplexer and Ethernet port built in.
• It spits out pages, single sided or duplexed,  pretty quick

But it’s not colour.  The difference between black and white or a colour Kyocera laser was £500!  I couldn’t justify that…

So what’s it like?

Well, I didn’t read the instructions very well when I first switched it on.  I left he light bar locked, despite numerous warnings on various bits of paper.  The result was that when first switched on, it beeped and said we had to phone for support!  I couldn’t believe my eyes!  I wasn’t going to phone support, so I looked in the document again and noticed the warning, unlocked the light bar and switched it back on.  The error didn’t appear after that.

We copied a few sheets of paper to test out the speed.  I couldn’t believe how quick it could duplex scan and then print a duplexed copy!  It made the HP look like it was from the Stone Age.

Since then I’ve added automatic e-mail alerting into the administration page, tried out email sending, FTP sending, duplexing and most importantly PDF printing.  I’m not sure why the HP didn’t like PDFs but it used to take up to 5 minutes per page for PDF printing!

Email Sending

I started off by typing in the e-mail address into the printer screen and sending a copy of the document on the printer only to get an error back.  I suppose I should have thought about it a little; you need to configure the SMTP settings on the admin panel first!  Once setup and a few trials later, sending via email works well, but more than a few documents and the email size limit will be broken.

FTP Sending

I’ve spent the last 4 hours setting this up!  I have a Netgear DGN2200 router and already have an accessible USB drive, so I started by trying to use that.  I tried enabling FTP from the router and adding various details to the printers address book, unplugging the network cable/network switch, re-reading the manual, but nothing would work.  Add to that, every time the printer displays an error, it prints a page! 40 pages later 🙁 I set up an FTP server on my pc and managed to get it to print to that instead.

PDF printing

A page would take up to 5 minutes to print on the HP, but the same document took only 10 seconds to print a single sheet with 8 pages duplexed onto one page.

Videos and Admin Console Images

At the bottom of the page are some videos and images of the machine and admin console in action.

Overall

Positives

Very pleased.  It’s expensive (£500), but worth it so far!

Neutrals

It’s so big we haven’t got anywhere to put it at the moment.  We can’t put it in the sun lounge as that was probably what killed the last one.

The toner cartridge sticks up a little at the front edge which seems odd, but doesn’t seem to cause an issue.

Negatives

The error messages are less than intuitive…  There’s been a lot of trial and error.

Video

Images