Kyocera Mita FS-C5150DN review

Kyocera’s FS-C5150DN is a heavy duty printer that’s designed to handle the high page yields required by small-to-medium businesses. Unlike many of its rivals, Kyocera doesn’t quote one-time maximum monthly duty cycle figures, and instead recommends a maximum monthly average of no more than 9,000 pages if you want to keep your printer running smoothly for as long as possible. It’s worth noting that the printer has a 100,000 page OPC drum that isn’t designed to be replaced, which means it’ll probably be more cost-effective to replace the printer when the drum runs out.

Because of the savings made by the fixed drum, the FS-C5150DN‘s print costs and total cost of ownership are remarkably low. It’s good value for money if your printing requirements are slight, costing just £333 over three years, but it is users undertaking medium to heavy-duty printing that’ll benefit the most. If you print 500 mono and 250 colour pages every month for three years you’ll spend just £1,180. That’s far less than you’d spend with most of Kyocera’s rivals.

It’s not particularly attractive, but the FS-C5150DN is massively upgradeable.

The FS-C5150DN is big, heavy and not particularly attractive. It’s a bit more complicated to assemble than more compact colour lasers, having a waste toner bottle to fit in addition to four toner cartridges, but its clear operating instructions meant we had no major problems physically setting it up, despite its slightly fiddly cartridge locking system. The FS-C5150DN’s massively upgradeable too, taking up to four additional paper trays for a maximum paper capacity of 1,250 pages. Out of the box, it starts with an input and output capacity of 250 pages.

Driver installation is incredibly fast and hassle-free thanks to an auto-detection system that scans your network for the printer and quickly installs the relevant drivers. The FS-C5150DN supports PCL 5c and PCL 6 as well as the PostScript 3-compatible KPDL 3 page description languages.

You can easily change the printer’s settings using its LCD screen and control panel.

The printer’s built-in menu system can be navigated using a handful of buttons and a mono LCD screen. You can easily access its network settings, paper configuration and print files directly from a USB stick, which is an unusual feature for a single-function printer. Its onboard menu options are also available via the printer’s HTML-based command centre, which makes it easy to remotely manage and monitor the device.

Ethernet and USB make this a flexible printer for personal or workgroup use.

The FS-C5150DN is a particularly fast mono printer, possessing a mono speed of 18.8ppm. Its 7.4ppm colour speed’s slower than most colour lasers, but we duplex printed 10 colour pages in a rather quick time of one minute and 28 seconds. Colour prints aren’t as bright and glossy as those of many rivals, but they’re accurately coloured and solidly shaded. Mono text is sharp, but it lacks the glossiness that we’re used to getting from most laser printers. While the lack of glossiness is notable, it doesn’t make the prints look cheap or faded. We’ve already touched on how cost-effective the FS-C5150DN is to run, but costs of just 1.3p per mono page and 9.2p per page of mixed black and colour prints are worth noting.

If you don’t print much, the Epson Aculaser C1750N because it has the same running costs for light use. If you’re after fast print speeds and glossy colour above all else, then the 3730DN is still a better option, but if you want a fairly high-yield workgroup printer that doesn’t cost much to run, then the FS-C5150DN is ideal.