Epson AcuLaser C1000

The Epson Aculaser C1000 is an A4 colour laser printer that's been designed for the small business or home office environment. Its chunky cube-like design has a small footprint (46.3 by 55.9 by 51.1cm; 49kg), it can hold up to 650 sheets of A4 paper and the consumables are easy to access and replace.

The printer comes as standard with a 500-sheet paper tray, a multipurpose tray that folds out on the right and 16Mb of memory. The standard connectors are USB and parallel.

Print resolutions available are 300dpi and 600dpi, although Epson includes Resolution Improvement Technology (RITech) and Fine Dot Control to improve coloured text and bump up the effective resolution to a claimed 2,400dpi.

However, it couldn't print our test bitmap image at 600dpi due to a lack of memory, which resulted in the automatic lowering of the resolution. So, if you want to print high quality images, more memory is a must.

The front panel of the device has no display or control buttons, just two status LEDs. Everything is controlled via the driver. It has extensive options, but begins with simple automatic settings.

Advanced settings allow you to use predefined configurations for specific tasks. Alternatively, you can control all the options manually and add a watermark.

The driver also accesses the Epson Status Monitor 3, which graphically shows both the paper and consumables' status and gives instructions for replacing the latter. Epson quotes maximum print speeds of 5ppm for colour and 20ppm for black only.

These figures were met by our tests using PrinterBench 99, although only when testing the mechanical maximum with nearly empty pages.

Real world printing tasks are slower, with a typical rate for spreadsheets of about 3.8ppm in colour and 9.9ppm in black only, although this falls to 1.6ppm for a colour bitmap image.

Epson also quotes a time to first page of 25 seconds for colour and 16 seconds for black only, although our test results were slightly better at 23.8 and 13.6 seconds, respectively.

The quality of the default image was less impressive. It took a while for the colour balance to settle and early printouts also showed strong hints of green in what should have been grey tones. This did rectify itself with more use, but it took dozens of pages of colour printing to do so. The black-only images were also very dark.

Price: £899.99 (ex VAT)

Specifications:

OS: Windows 9x, ME, 2000, NT 4.0
Engine technology: colour laser
Print processor: 200MHz Risc TMPR4955AF
Memory: 16Mb
Duty cycle: 35,000.

Contact: Epson 0800 220 546
www.epson.co.uk

See also:

Hewlett Packard Business Inkjet 2600dn

An excellent network-ready workgroup printer capable of high-quality colour output.  11 Jul 2002

Xerox Phaser 7700GX

A very fast and versatile printer with solid network manageability and support functions.  02 May 2002

Epson Aculaser C1000

A fast and simple to use printer at a great price  27 Mar 2002

Samsung ML6040 Printer

A good laser printer for the lower-end of the market.  01 Dec 2000

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