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KYOCERA F-1200

"Have you been following the series on Laser Printers in Micro Computer Mart?  I have had a chance to get my hands on a laser printer from Kyocera Electronics - the F-1200.  Let me tell you what I thought of it."





I have access to a good range of printers, including two lasers.  My dot matrix printer has been a good 'old faithful' over the years, happily churning out reasonable copy.  The daisy wheel printer has given me good reason to be proud of my business correspondence - but like a typewriter it is limited by the characters on its print wheel. Both machines are noisy, and for anything more than a page in length they are unbearably slow.  

Because of this, and the need to print a variety of documents at speed - including newsletters, leaflets and catalogues - I bought a laser printer. Recently the price of laser printers has fallen and they are now well within the reach of even the smallest business requiring this type of quality output. Once you discover all their benefits it can become impossible to resist the desire to upgrade - I did.

Over the past five years this new generation of printers have made a big impact in the office environment.  The laser printer really is able to give the best performance and now printing from a micro has come of age.  Page printing is the term used to describe these machines as the process used is no longer a line by line (or character by character) affair.  They get straight to the point and print a page at a time at around ten pages per minute - that's over 500 pages an hour!  The printing process is very similar to that used in modern office photocopiers and if you would like to know how laser printers work read the earlier articles in the series - 'LASER PRINTERS A comprehensive guide' written by the Sales and Support Team at Kyocera. 

Kyocera is pronounced 'Key-oh-sair-a' and is derived from Kyo (which means capital) and the Japanese word for ceramics. Kyoto was the capital of Japan until about 150 years ago.  The Kyocera Company was founded in 1959 in Kyoto and their first products were fine ceramics. Nowadays Kyocera have become famous for their range of electronic equipment. The Kyocera F-1200 is a fine example of what this new generation of printers is capable of.  Let me explain why.

The Kyocera F-1200 is a very compact printer measuring only 320 mm high x 428 mm wide x 450 mm deep.  The detachable paper feed tray - which holds 250 sheets of A4 paper - protrudes only another 180 mm from the right hand side.  The paper delivery unit is on the top of the machine which all helps to make this a very compact unit.  The F-1200 weighs in at around 26 Kg, robust and very well built. I was able to comfortably place the F-1200 on my desk and was quite happy to do so as it runs very quietly.

Connecting the printer to my micro was easy as it has an RS232 and Parallel interface as standard.  I simply disconnected the mains power and printer cable from one of the other laser printers and plugged them into the F-1200.  Installed the toner cartridge and developer unit into its hopper.  This compartment is located on the top of the laser and it is very easy to locate and install the consumables that these printers use. The power on/off switch is at the front right hand side.

Many laser printers are supplied in a rather limited form with options to upgrade as necessary.  Without at least 1.5 MByte RAM you will not be able to print full page graphics and it is a mistake to imagine that you will not be needing to in the future.  As you get to know what these page printers are capable of you will, like me, soon find many uses that it can be put to, saving money printing your catalogues, price lists, newsletters, technical diagrams and the like.The F-1200 is supplied with a full 1.5 MByte of RAM - this makes it able to print full A4 pages of graphics at 300 x 300 dpi - and can take a further 2 MByte. The built in video RAM adds another 2 MByte and the font ROM is another 1 MByte to accommodate the very good selection of 79 built in fonts.  Like Kyocera's other laser printers the F-1200 is controlled by an MC 68000 CPU.

Control Panel

The front of the printer is dominated by a full length control panel which includes a 32 character LCD display.  Operating the machine is easy as the controls use a combination of named touch sensitive buttons and icons.  Kyocera have kept multi function buttons to an absolute minimum so that it is easy to remember which buttons to press when setting up the printer.  When switched on the machine defaults to the most likely settings but these may be changed to those desired  by individual users, and made permanent, by reprogramming the firmware. These reprogrammable settings include the paper orientation, font, page offsets, character set and printer emulation.

The control panel gives users full control of the machine and is easy to use.  There isn't space to describe them in detail here but suffice to say, with a quick read of the manual and experimentation I was  printing text based documents within half an hour of unpacking the machine.  It took more reading of the manual to be able to print from desk top publishing software using the HP Laserjet + emulation it had been installed for.  The F-1200 was printing small sections of the page at a time.  This was caused by an incompatible 'time out' setting.  The time out setting controls the length of time the printer waits for data before printing the page.  With the complex task of generating the data for printing pages from desk top publishing software, there can be delays while the micro is working. This caused my one page document to be printed onto around four pages.  A simple reset of the time out setting and I was rewarded with a full page graphic.

Quality Counts

Output from the F-1200 is very impressive.  Slight imperfections are hardly noticeable when printing text with a laser printer. But with graphics, especially those that have areas of solid black in them, these imperfections are easily spotted.  I am very impressed with the quality of the print achieved with this machine - text is solid and well formed.  Graphics too are  superbly printed with those solid areas faithfully reproduced onto the paper.  Not being content with just a few copies, I wanted to see how long this printer could maintain the quality so I loaded it up with A4 paper and set the count for a long run.  I used standard photocopier paper from my local supplier and the whole run of around 2000 sheets went through smoothly. The only interruption to the printing was the need to stop and fill up the paper tray with fresh supplies.  The quality of the printout was maintained consistently throughout.  The F-1200 proved to be a real workhorse that I came to rely upon.

On long print runs, paper jams and misfeeds can be a problem with some laser printers, not with this one.  When it is being fed from the paper tray the machine can be safely ignored for sometime.

Paper other than A4 and B4 has to be hand fed into the machine, a sheet at a time.  It is able to print envelopes, OHP film, adhesive labels and ready printed paper such as standard letterheadings (although you could very easily print your own with a laser printer). Using the manual paper feed I found that paper misfeeds, jams and printing alignment suffered when using these non standard paper sizes.  Even with practice I found it difficult to get to grips with this problem.

Emulations

The F-1200 is supplied with a whole range of emulations as standard. These are the HP Laserjet, Line Printer, IBM Graphic Printer, Diablo 630, Qume Sprint 11, NEC Spinwriter and the Epson FX80.  The F Series printers also use the Prescribe Printer Control Language.

Apart from the resident fonts laser printers can use 'downloaded' fonts. These are widely available and give users to an extensive variety of typefaces. They speed up the printing of multi page documents when using desk top publishing software but the F-1200 hardly needed that.  I couldn't believe the speed that this machine could operate at. It's not just its 10 pages per minute that's impressive. It's the ability to commit the next page into memory while it's printing the first that I found a real timesaver. Many other laser printers finish printing out the first page before accepting data for the next. The delay can be around 15 minutes when printing complex graphics or from desk top publishing software.  Not so with the F-1200. This made a big difference to the printing time as a 10 page document could take quite sometime to compose each page but the ability to continue accepting data from the micro for the next page, while printing the first, was a feature that I found particulary rewarding.

Consumables

Unlike conventional printers that use ink ribbons, lasers use a toner substance for the printing process.  The toner kit lasts around 3,000 copies (depending on the density of text or graphics being printed). This toner kit costs #25. Other consumables required are a replacement printing drum costing #146 which lasts 10,000 copies. The developer unit is good for 50,000 copies costing #127 and a replacement fuser kit costs #255 but lasts for 80,000 copies. What these costs boil down to is a very reasonable .028 pence per page.  This compares favourably with other laser printers and even some photocopiers. All costs excluding VAT.

I particularly liked the easy access to the toner/developer unit compartment.  This is gained from the top of the machine, unlike some other machines that require the printer to be opened which gives limited access to work in. Changing the toner kit is easy and not messy with the F-1200.

Models

There are five laser printers in the Kyocera range with suggested prices from #2,180 up to #5,500 for the PostScript compatible P-2000. The F-1200's suggest retail price is #3,200 but by studying the market you should be able to knock as much as #750 pounds off this price.

Their F-1000 printer has a suggested retail price of #2180 but I have seen it advertised at #1489.  This basic model is supplied with limited RAM (512 KByte but expandable to 1.5 MByte at a cost of #362) and lacks a few of the additional features of the more expensive models.

I found it a pleasure to work with the Kyocera F-1200, everything behaved as it should, the manuals were easy to follow and are written clearly. Apart from the manual paper feed problems I've all ready described, I could not fault the F-1200 and would gladly swap the review machine for one of my other laser printers.

Kyocera's F Series laser printers are widely available nationwide. If you would like to find the address of your nearest dealer telephone Kyocera Electronics (UK) Ltd (0734) 31150 or write to Kyocera Electronics (UK) Ltd  8 Beacontree Plaza, Gillette Way, Reading. RG2 0BP