Review: Epson Aculaser C1100N laser printer

At £296.10, Epson's Aculaser C1100N is more expensive than Canon’s Laser Shot LBP 5200, but this is due to the inclusion of the network interface denoted by the ‘N’ suffix.

The non-networked version undercuts Canon’s printer by a few pounds, offers faster performance and comes with additional features such as an LCD status panel, Macintosh support and optional duplex printing – all of which were lacking from our review model.

The paper tray, like that of the LBP 5200, is more of a slot, although it is protected from office dust behind a small door. Capacity is rather low, at 180 pages, but this can be expanded to 680 with an additional tray.

With a speed of 25ppm in mono, you’re unlikely to notice a drop in performance when compared to a typical mono laser. It’s also incredibly quick to deliver the first page of your print job, beating the 30ppm Lexmark C510n to a 10-page mono sprint.

At 5ppm, colour printing speed is adequate. Achieving a faster rate would involve sacrificing mono performance, image quality or you would pay a much higher price.

The C1100N is particularly fast at printing full-page colour photos, thanks to configurable compression settings, placing it at the top of our graph in this test.

Compared to more expensive printers, the status display and control panel are rather basic, but more useful than no panel at all – simply having a ‘cancel’ button is enough to avoid many paper-wasting headaches.

Included as standard is a software pack containing 150 design templates for Microsoft Office and Web2Page software to ensure printed web pages fit neatly onto your chosen paper.

In its networkable incarnation the C1100N supports a large number of printing and network management protocols, making it suitable for workgroups of various sizes at a much lower price than Dell’s 3100cn.

This is part of a group test on budget colour laser printers. Other articles are:
Intro and Editor's choice
Canon Laser Shot LBP 5200
Dell 3100cn
HP Color Laserjet 2600n
Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL
Lexmark C510n
Oki C3200
Xerox Phaser 6120
The Real Cost of Printing