Epson AcuLaser C900 Colour Laser Printer 

What drew my attention to the C900 was a claim that is costs less to print a monochrome page with it than a mono laser could. It took me a while to get my head round this but apparently independent tests have proved that the C900 used in mono mode has costs of 1p per page. The entry level HP1010 (one third the price) has a cost of 1.8p per page but that is hardly conclusive evidence, however a spreadsheet I have seen costs lots of other printers and few – if any – can get close to 1p per page.

However this is a colour laser and as such using it as a monochrome printer seems – on the face of it – a little strange. Colour printing is not cheap and soon Epson will have a free downloadable utility to work with most of their colour lasers to control whom and or when is allowed to print in colour.

Around £400 for a colour laser sounds very reasonable and indeed it is, in fact around a year ago anything under a £1000 probably fell off the back of a lorry. This uses the four pass technology which means that colour printing is a quarter the speed of mono and even though it is a colour printer the speed often advertised is 16ppm but in colour this is only 4ppm.

The output is good but a little time will be required to get output to look as the screen does, and, in fact you will probably need to change screen colours a bit to get the colour output you want. Plain paper on a colour laser does look better than plain paper on an inkjet however the expensive photo paper output from an inkjet still looks best of all.

The unit is not surprisingly, fairly large as there are four different colours to input onto the paper and it is heavy. In fact I did not think any of my tables would be strong enough to take it – even if I was strong enough to lift it up – so I reviewed it on the floor. It is 41cm deep, 49cm wide and 39cm tall. You really need access – or at least some clearance – to all sides. The paper tray is at the back and although the top of it lifts off I suggest that you need around 15cm extra to fill the tray.

Paper is loaded face up and is delivered face down on top of the machine. I found it quite noisy in use but soon got quite used to the three movements that would not produce a page before the forth did. As always I use a variety of weights and makes of paper even during the same print run. I did get a paper jam, the on screen error prompt told me which door to open and then told me how to clear it. Not bad from a printer driver that only took 27MB of hard disc space, beleive me this is small by today’s bloat ware.

When you first switch on the time to first page out can be as much as three minutes but there is a lot more machinery to warm up than in a mono laser. On one occasion I was told I did not have enough memory (16MB supplied) but pressing continue seemed to satisfy it and the document printed correctly. In mono you do get 16PPM, and, in colour 4PPM exactly as claimed. However on printing one large database I would liked to have used monochrome mode but despite telling it – more than once – to print in black the apply option remained greyed out and it printed in colour. This was the exception and all other applications I tried were willing to print a colour document in black even if some would still not allow it to by applied.

A look at the Epson website shows a very special offer of, buy the C900 and get a CX5400 inkjet printer FREE.

Link:http://www.epson.co.uk/whatsnew/promo/surgery/GPMailer.pdf