Kyocera's FS-1061DN is a simple, compact mono laser printer for small workgroups, with a wired Ethernet port and a reasonable 25ppm speed. Automatic duplex (double-sided) printing is enabled by default, which saves paper on longer jobs, plus the ceramic photoconductor drum is rated for 100,000 pages.
The printer comes with a 1,000-page consumable and replacements are available with a capacity of 2,100 pages, which is a bit low even for a small workgroup. Using these, we calculated the print costs to be about 2.3p per page, which isn't ideal for heavy use and is higher than we'd expect from Kyocera Mita.
Although basic, this printer feels well built. The paper tray is topped by a clip-in plastic cover that forms the base of a multipurpose bypass feed, and it’s less flimsy than many we've encountered, with clear paper and envelope markings for the manual feed and detents to hold it open when you're re-stocking the main tray. The printer addressed DL envelopes without crumpling them, but the user must press the Go button once for each envelope, which could get tedious.
This isn't the quietest laser we've tested, with a slight clunk when picking each new sheet of paper and a moderate harshness to one of the motors. Fortunately, however, these quickly stopped after each job so it wasn't too hard to live with. Pressing the dedicated Quiet mode button seemed to reduce the printer's speed much more effectively than its noise output.
The Kyocera FS-1061DN managed a reasonable 20 pages per minute (ppm) in our mono letter test, dropping to around 16.5ppm with Quiet mode enabled. In Regular mode, it was somewhat slower when dealing with our 24-page greyscale graphics test, pausing briefly every three pages or so and reaching only 12.2ppm overall. Although duplexing was slower still, at about 11 sides per minute, it was surprisingly quick for such a compact printer.
We weren't overly impressed with the quality of prints from the FS-1061DN. While text appeared crisp to the naked eye, it was less black than we'd expect from a good laser, with the strokes forming each character seeming thinner than typical. Graphical prints were free of obvious dither patterns, but photos seemed soft and lacking in contrast in lighter areas. We also observed a subtle, thin stripe running the length of each page, although this appeared to grow fainter as we printed more pages.
The FS-1061DN produces comparatively little waste, but it isn't exceptionally quick, its print quality isn't great and it isn't very cheap to run. We'd pay another £65 or so for the faster Samsung ML-3710ND which, with lower print costs, would prove cheaper to own for anyone who prints at least 5,500 sides of paper, as it costs just over 1p per page.
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