Kyocera Mita FS-6970DN Review

It can be very useful to have a printer in your office that produces pages larger than A4. The most obvious use is if you’re producing an A4 newsletter, where you can print page spreads in one job and fold them down. If the printer can duplex pages, it makes it even simpler. Kyocera Mita’s FS-6970DN can do both.

The company has styled this A4 mono laser printer to fit in with the rest of its new range and it has the same simple, but functional, looks. Coloured in black and cream, a deep indentation in the top cover takes the printed pages and you only need to flip forward the extra paper support when printing A3. A4 pages print in landscape mode, anyway.

The control panel uses a 2-line by 16-character, backlit LCD display with the usual collection of control buttons; a four-way ring encompassing an OK button, and others for Menu, Start Print and to Stop a current job. Behind the display, Ready, Data and Attention lights are raised up on a small ridge, so they can be more easily seen from a distance.

Navigating the printer’s menus takes a little concentration, as Kyocera Mita has chosen to select options with the right arrow key in the navigation ring and to flip through them with the up and down arrows, which is the opposite way round to most other printers.

At the bottom of the front panel is a 250-sheet paper tray and a 100-sheet multi-purpose tray folds down from above this. 250-sheets is too low a capacity for a machine intended for workgroups and, although you can add up to five more 250-sheet trays, it should be able to take more by default.

Below the control panel is a USB drive socket and you can print PDF files directly from a stick, as a walk-up function. At the back are sockets for USB, 10/100 Ethernet and a legacy parallel connection.

The ceramic drum, a Kyocera Mita hallmark, is rated at 300,000 pages, so even in a busy office, it probably won’t need replacing over the life of the machine. The only consumable is therefore toner and a 7,500-sheet cartridge is provided with the machine. This plugs-in very conveniently under its top cover and the machine then goes through a 10 minute charging cycle, before it’s ready to start printing.

There are drivers available for all versions of Windows since 95, for OS X and for certain varieties of Linux and these are comprehensive, covering all the features of the printer.

One of the main reasons printer makers think they can keep prices high is if they offer high-speed. The FS-6970DN is rated at 37ppm single-sided and 17ppm in duplex mode. These speeds exclude processing time, which always seems a bit of a cheat to us, as you have to wait for processing and printing before you can walk away with your finished document.

Timing the complete cycle for a five-page text document gives a real-world print speed of 13.6ppm, but this rises to 21.8ppm when printing a 20-page job, where the processing time is a smaller proportion of the overall cycle. Even so, it’s some way off 37ppm. Our five-page text and graphics document took 29 seconds, which is 10.34ppm and this is very close to the speed of a 20-page, A3 document, too.

Printing in duplex mode, which the printer handles very neatly, produced speeds of 15.38spm for A4 and 6.82spm for A3. Finally a 15 x 10cm photo print on A4 takes 23 seconds. Overall, while this printer is certainly quick, it’s not as quick as it’s made out to be.

The main thing the FS-6970DN will be required to print is text and it does this reasonably cleanly, though there’s a little more fuzz around characters than we expected. This may be because the printer prints A4 pages sideways and you’re more likely to notice a dispersal of toner along the long sides of characters, as opposed to their shorter tops and bottoms. This theory is supported by the portrait A3 pages we printed, which showed cleaner characters.

Greyscale graphics are printed lighter than from some other machines and fills in particular are quite spare. On the other hand, our photo test picture shows quite a bit of mottling in an area of sky and most shadow detail is lost.

As toner is the only consumable on this machine and with the TK-450 cartridge offering 15,000 pages for just under £80, page costs come out commendably low. Even including 0.7p for paper, which is our norm, the machine is only costing 1.15p per A4 page. This is a very good figure and may be the most important purchase factor.

HP Officejet 6000 printer

There are reams of cheap and cheerful printers doing the rounds at the moment and if you’re in the market for a low-yield device for home use, HP’s range has plenty to offer.

The Officejet 6000 is a colour inkjet that promises to make short work of photos and text printing with fast speeds and high-quality results, and also tips its hat towards the eco-friendly market by allegedly consuming 40% less energy and costing 40% less per page compared to colour laser printers.

Considering the single-use nature of the device, it’s a little more bulky than we’d expect and we weren’t overly enamoured by the dull grey and black colour scheme, which comes across as rather dated. It’s also a bit of a pain to set-up, with a rather lengthy software installation that threw up a few errors that, while eventually resolved, seemed needless considering you’re basically setting up a printer driver. Once past the rather underwhelming start, HP thankfully makes up for these issues with some impressive results when it comes to performance.

The Officejet 6000 is indeed pretty fast compared to similar inkjets, and in our tests it was capable of hitting 20 pages per minute on draft setting for text prints. A4, full-colour photos are printable in around 20 seconds at default settings and though this takes over 2 minutes at the highest quality, we didn’t notice much of an improvement and for most, the standard print options should do fine. Luckily, quality is impressive across the board; letters were sharp and clear and colours vibrant and accurate enough to satisfy amateur photographers.

While HP gets it right where it matters with the Officejet 6000, it is a rather basic device that seems clearly oriented towards fast, no-fuss printing. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, but considering rivals are available at around half the price, we’d expect at least a smattering of bells and whistle here to help justify the expense.

There’s no dedicated photo tray, for example, and while 6 x 4-inch prints can be managed, paper will need to be manually aligned in the main tray. There are also no wireless capabilities built-in, though an Ethernet port is present for those requiring network access, and useful extras such as duplex printing, a colour display and USB port for PictBridge support or direct printing are conspicuous by their absence.

HP OfficeJet 6000 Review

We don’t often test two printers from the same manufacturer consecutively, but with HP’s OfficeJet 6000, it’s interesting to compare it directly with the OfficeJet 6500 Wireless, covered earlier this week. That’s because this is the single-function version of that Recommended all-in-one.

All-in-ones now far outstrip sales of single-function printers, so how does a simple printer stand up in this market? Its main selling points have to be simplicity of use, lower price…and smaller size.

This is a simple but stylish printer, finished in black and white with generous curves to all its corners. At first glance it appears to have a small footprint, but the output tray set into the lid of its main paper tray has to be extended, almost doubling its length, before you start printing.

Controls and indicators are simple, with indicators for the four ink tanks and buttons for paper feed, job cancel and Ethernet connection, as well as a power button. There’s no duplexer to clip in at the back of the machine, though you do have to deal with the separate, black-block power supply.

Setting the OfficeJet 6000 up to print is straightforward, though it involves a lot of unwrapping. Each of the four ink cartridges has a twist-off seal, is shrink-wrapped and comes in a cardboard box and the clip-in print head comes in a separate plastic box. Once they’re all installed, the printer runs through a one-off charging cycle which takes about 10 minutes, but it still makes various pumping and squeezing noises before and during print jobs.

Software installation is long-winded for a machine where no scanner or photo management software has to be installed and it’s a shame you have to restart your PC to complete it. This shouldn’t be necessary for a printer driver.

HP quotes three different speeds for the 6000 and 6500. With the 6000 it’s draft and laser quality, while with the 6500 it’s draft and normal. Normal is somewhere between the other two and is what both printers, unsurprisingly, default to. The laser speeds for the 6000 are quoted as 7ppm for both black and colour print.

Under test, we saw 7.32ppm for normal mode, black print from our 5-page test sample. This increased to 9.23ppm for the 20-page document, so it’s a bit quicker than in laser mode. Compared with the 6500, which recorded 4.16ppm and 8.97ppm in the same print mode, the 6000 is quite a bit quicker, though it’s not easy to see why, given the same inkjet engine and a very similar driver.

The 5-page colour document gave 4.55ppm on the 6000 and 3.90ppm on the 6500, so again a touch faster. Printing a 15 x 10cm photo in Best quality mode on this machine took 1:05 and just 38 seconds when all settings were left on automatic. The all-in-one took 51 seconds when set to automatic. Overall, this printer is consistently quicker than the all-in-one, though not substantially so.

The quality of the prints is much the same as from the OfficeJet 6500 Wireless, with crisp, but not exceptionally sharp text characters and bright colour graphics. Block graphics are a little light and there’s some ink-run when black is laid over colour. Registration is good, though.

When it comes to photo prints, the OfficeJet 6000 can print in Best mode, where you set the print resolution and paper type, or left to print automatically, where its senses the paper you’re feeding and adjusts the image accordingly. There was very little difference in our two test prints, though the Best mode print was marginally clearer, with more detail in areas of shadow.

The print quality from this machine, while possibly not up to that of a genuine laser printer, is easily good enough for most home and small-business uses and for day-to-day prints, the differences would be largely academic.

Using the same set of HP 920 cartridges as the 6500, the running costs are, unsurprisingly, the same. The OfficeJet 6000 prints an ISO black page for 2.2p and a colour one for 5.41p, both including 0.7p for plain paper. These costs are very reasonable and compare well with both other inkjet printers and, perhaps more interestingly, with similarly-priced colour lasers.

Take the Canon i-SENSYS LBP5050 or the Konica Minolta Magicolor 1600W, both at around £150. The Canon costs 2.66p and 11.52p for the same pages and the Konica Minolta costs come out at 3.71p and 13.43p. The OfficeJet 6000 isn’t that much cheaper on black print, but on the colour pages it’s between 54 percent and 60 percent cheaper. That’s around 6p you’re saving on every colour page printed