Kyocera Mita Taskalfa 500ci

Kyocera has refreshed its top-end multifunction printer/copier (MFP) range, giving the rebranded Taskalfa family a smart blue/black livery, reworked internals and a lot more besides.

Four Taskalfa models have been introduced, all based on the same A3 colour-laser engine. Maximum throughput is 50ppm (pages per minute) on the 500ci model we tested, while the entry level 250ci (from £8,250 ex Vat) starts off the family with a more modest 25ppm.

Duplexing comes as standard and there is a choice of two document processors, that’s 600dpi (dots per inch) or scanners to you and me, which are also duplex-capable, and can either scan both sides together on the DP-760 (at £1,450 ex Vat) or in two passes on the (£845 ex Vat) DP-750.

Two 500-sheet paper drawers are built in as standard along with a 100-sheet multipurpose feeder for card and other awkward materials. You can then add all kinds of other paper handling options including an extra feeder with either two more 500-sheet drawers (£1,025 ex Vat) or a 3,000-sheet bin (£1,395 ex Vat).

A basic finisher with a stapler built in is another option (£1,545 ex Vat) while an all-singing all-dancing finisher with stapler, hole punch and booklet folding abilities will set you back £4,873 ex Vat.

A large (8.5in) touchscreen is provided for walk-up scan/copy operations with an intuitive interface that makes light work of most routine tasks. You also get facilities to both scan directly to a USB memory stick and print PDFs and other documents held on removable USB media.

You can scan documents to email or to a shared network, with a built-in multiprotocol print server and 10/100Mbits/sec Ethernet interface.

Interface branding is another useful option along with facilities to tailor menus to specific users. There’s even a built-in web browser, although, as yet, you can’t print displayed pages or preview PDFs or other documents from the front-panel browser.

Quality is impressive, all the more so because Taskalfa is aimed at the general office rather than specialist graphics market with a maximum resolution of just 600dpi. Text is crisp and colour images are well defined, even when printing or copying photos using the default settings.

Warm-up times are minimal – just a few seconds at most – while calibration tasks are performed on a regular basis and abandoned if a print/copy job is received while in progress.

On the downside Taskalfa is far from a cheap solution – a well-specified 500ci will easily cost £20,000 ex Vat if you go for all the options. Still, that compares well with other high-end MFPs from Canon, Konica-Minolta, Toshiba and Xerox, slower models are available for a lot less.

Kyocera prides itself on delivering low cost of ownership thanks to its long-life silicon drum (300,000 pages) leaving toner as the only consumable to really worry about.

Colour cartridges on the 500ci cost just £80 ex Vat and are good for 12,000 pages each while black cartridges (£66 ex Vat) offer a whopping 20,000 pages.

And a new toner has been developed which uses 30 per cent less material to get the same image density and reduces fuser temperature by 20ºC and overall power consumption by around 15 per cent.

Add these benefits to the impressive performance and ease of use and you get a great print/copy workhorse that stacks up well against any of the competition.