Kyocera Mita FS-C8025MFP multifunction colour laser printer

The Kyocera Mita FS-C8025MFP is a multifunction colour laser printer loaded with features that small and medium businesses will love. It's expensive to buy, but its feature-set and specifications means it's versatile enough to suit changing business needs. The possibility of upgrades means that even larger businesses should find a use for the Kyocera Mita FS-C8025MFP.

Kyocera Mita FS-C8025MFP: Setup, design and features

As you'd expect, unpacking and setting up the Kyocera Mita FS-C8025MFP is a two-person job — at 80kg it's not something you can move around on your own. Apart from actually moving the printer, though, set up is a simple job — all we had to do was install the four supplied toner cartridges, and connect the Kyocera Mita FS-C8025MFP to our test computer and Ethernet network. After switching on the power a short series of configuration prompts came up on the FS-C8025MFP's 4.3in colour touchscreen, and after that the printer was ready to go. We hooked up the Kyocera Mita FS-C8025MFP to a wired network and also directly connected a Apple Macbook Pro via USB.

The Kyocera Mita FS-C8025MFP is logically laid out for a standalone A3 multifunction colour laser printer. The buttons arranged around the front-mounted, slightly tilted touchscreen are easy to comprehend and clearly labelled. The top-mounted flatbed scanner incorporates an automated document feeder that easily held and scanned our 25 page test document, while default paper input is a 600-sheet cassette that supports all paper sizes up to A3.

The printer includes a range of features that larger businesses will make good use of. PDF and JPG scanning to USB or email (with an integrated address book) cuts down on paper usage, and you can purchase an optional fax unit. Big businesses will appreciate the option to purchase an additional two paper feeders for increasing the printer's capacity up to 1600 sheets or storing multiple paper sizes simple. The scanner in the Kyocera Mita FS-C8025MFP is able to resolve plenty of detail from A4 documents — copying is a quick process and produces results which are very close the original document.

Kyocera Mita FS-C8025MFP: Toner costs, print speed and print quality

The Kyocera Mita FS-C8025MFP is more than fast enough to handle small and medium print jobs. The first page out time for colour documents is around 15 seconds in our testing, but for monochrome this drops to around 11 seconds. Pages are steadily pumped out at close to 25 pages per second, regardless of whether they are colour or monochrome pages. This meant our 50 page test document printed out in 2min 12sec, which is more than bearable.

The quality of the documents produced by the Kyocera Mita FS-C8025MFP, both directly printing and by scanning, is as clean and accurate as you'd expect from a $5500 printer. Text even down to 5pt sizes is smoothly recreated with no jagged edges, and larger size type is clean and consistent. There's also no difference in clarity between monochrome and colour text. Graphics are as well-saturated as you'd find on a high quality inkjet printer, and the only problem we noticed was a little graininess on dark areas in plain paper A4 photo print-outs — hardly an appropriate task for this printer.

The Kyocera Mita FS-C8025MFP has four individual toner cartridges — there's cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The $109 black lasts for 12,000 pages (an overall cost of 0.9 cents per page), while each $119 colour cartridge lasts for 6000 pages (1.9 cents per colour per page, or 7.9 cents for a full colour page). These prices are as low as you'd expect from a large workgroup printer — if you're using it over a long period, the low operating costs of this printer will offset the high purchase price.

Kyocera Mita FS-C8025MFP: Conclusion

It has an expensive initial asking price, but the Kyocera Mita FS-C8025MFP is a powerful and versatile multifunction colour laser printer that can print well at sizes up to A3. It's also possible to upgrade the printer to suit more demanding business needs.

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