Epson Aculaser M200DN Printer Review
Make/Model: Epson AcuLaser M2000DN
Type: Office laser printer
Web site: www.epson.co.uk
Typical online price: £232 (£202 ex VAT)
The Aculaser M2000DN can be considered either as a fairly high-end personal mono laser printer or as a small workgroup machine to be shared between, say, four or five people in an office. Coloured in white and dark grey, the printer has simple, cuboid lines, and a conventional design for a small footprint laser printer.
Paper feeds from a 250-sheet paper tray or a 50-sheet multipurpose tray which folds out from the front panel, to a depression in the top surface of the machine. A second, 250-sheet tray is available as an option.
Controls are simple buttons to print a status page, cancel a print job and switch the printer on and off-line and there are six LEDs for various status indications. It would be good to have an LCD display in place of these indicators, as the meanings of their various combinations take some learning.
USB 2 and Ethernet connectors are provided as standard and setup of both the software and the toner cartridge, which drops in through a hatch in the top of the machine, is very straightforward. The machine is supplied with a 2,000-page starter cartridge, though the standard and high-yield consumables offer 3,500 and 8,000 pages.
Epson claims a maximum speed of 28ppm for the AcuLaser M2000DN, but even printing our longer, 20-page document, we only saw just over 21ppm, three quarters of the maximum. This is still a fair turn of speed for a compact machine like this. The speed for our five-off, text and graphics job was slightly faster than for a five-page text document, with speeds coming out at 17.7ppm and 15.8ppm, respectively.
Switch in the duplexer and speeds drop to 13.2spm, but this is still adequate for general-purpose business printing, so the machine could probably be set to duplex by default.
Print quality is generally very good. Text comes through crisp and clean, though a little light by default. Greyscale graphics show little banding, though there isn’t always enough range in the greyscales to distinguish between different colours in originals. Photo prints are OK for a mono laser, though some detail in darker, shadowed areas can be lost.
Verdict
The Epson AcuLaser M2000DN is a rebadged version of the Kyocera Mita FS-1350DN and while it delivers good quality print, at speed and at very reasonable running costs, the speed and cost figures are not quite as good as from the Kyocera Mita original. If you already run Epson machines, however, you won’t lose much by sticking with your existing brand.
Running Costs: 9/10
Speed: 21.4ppm black, measured 9/10
Print quality
Text print: 9/10
Text/Graphics: 8/10
Photo 7/10
Features: 7/10
Overall: 8/10
