Despite the current push for sub-£1,000 A4 colour laser printers, these
products tend to cut too many corners in the specification. Panasonic's KX-CL500
provides a more realistic starting point with plenty of memory, decent paper
capacity and a network interface at an equally realistic price.
The basic unit appears to be a plain cube with a 530-sheet paper input
cassette at the bottom. The front panel of this cassette hinges open and
telescopes out to form a multipurpose tray. It's a bit fiddly and flimsy but it
works, and is big enough to hold up to 250 sheets.
Toners and drums are separate replaceable items. The imaging drums (one for
black and a special triple-drum unit for colour) are installed with some effort
on the right-hand side of the printer. In sharp contrast, the toner cartridges
are easily slotted in under a flap on top of the unit - anyone could do it. The
cartridges are big for such a small A4 printer, keeping running costs down to
around 5p per sheet.
Print speed is impressive at around 15 pages per minute (ppm) for black and
13.6ppm for colour. This doesn't come close to the official rating, but is good.
Sheets are printed in one pass, hence the fast colour output performance. Output
quality is good and comparable with other colour lasers, but the printing
process itself is much quieter.
A 10/100 Base Tx network interface comes as standard and network functions
are well implemented via an embedded web server, so you can manage the printer
remotely using a web browser, and using the on-printer menus was just as easy.
The best part of this purchase is that you get two years' worth of black
toner for free. Obviously, we would have preferred colour cartridges, but this
still represents a huge saving.
Contact: Panasonic 08700 100 464
www.panasonic.co.uk
Specifications:
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