Epson Aculaser M2400DN review

Epson’s Aculaser M2400DN is aimed at home users and small workgroups, and accordingly has a better specification than you’d see on an entry-level device. The 1,200dpi print resolution should help it deliver high quality graphics, while a quoted print speed of 35ppm is rapid at this price. The printer has an Ethernet port and built-in automatic duplex (double-sided) printing. Its other highlights are a robust 50,000 pages per month maximum duty cycle, and support for the PCL 6 and PostScript 3 print languages.

Few mono laser printers set the heart racing, but the M2400DN is smart-looking enough. It’s a reasonably compact device that’s light enough for most people to lift on their own, and is made from tasteful if bland white and grey plastics. Installing drivers from the supplied setup disk threw up compatibility error messages on our Windows 7 64-bit test PC: we had to visit Epson’s site to download more recent software. Once installed the printer is reasonably quiet in action, but we found that it transmitted a degree of rumble through the desktop. The cooling fan, while not annoying, takes a while to stop after each job.

During our first print tests, paper collecting in the 250-sheet output tray became untidy and spilled out, highlighting the importance of raising the flip-up paper stop. The printer proved extremely rapid, reaching 28.3ppm on our 25-page letter test, and dropping only to 27.7ppm when printing our complex 24-page graphical test – a particularly competitive result. Typically for a laser printer, photos printed at the highest resolution were a little slower, with longer job preparation times. Still, with two 10×8 inch photos taking only 17 seconds, the M2400DN is no slouch.

Unfortunately, while the quality of black text was predictably good, graphics were less impressive. Illustrations and PowerPoint slides looked good from a distance, but up close the dither patterns used to create different shades were quite apparent, and there was a degree of banding where toner had been laid down slightly unevenly. Photographs were worse, with our colour test images reproduced in greyscale with a pronounced, grid-like pattern of readily visible dots. Our black and white test photo didn’t suffer the same issue, but the printer seemed to have boosted the subject’s contrast, giving artificial-looking results.

The M2400DN compares much better when it comes to running costs, however, which at 1.6p per mono page are low for this class. Total ownership costs are reasonable, too: buying the printer with all the toner necessary to print 21,000 pages would cost a competitive £511. Overall, though, the M2400DN is outclassed by the Canon i-Sensys LBP6300dn. Canon’s printer is slightly slower, but it’s cheaper to buy and run and produces better prints.