Less contoured than earlier Porsche-designed printers from eco-friendly Kyocera, the FS-1000 is nonetheless small and attractive and should have no difficulty fitting onto a small desk or shelf. You'd be recommended to give it a bit of breathing space, though, so you can make good use of the impressive array of doors and openings. Around the front you can pull out the paper tray, capable of holding up to 250 sheets of standard 80gsm photocopy paper, above which is the multi-purpose feeder that will handle anything up to 163gsm. At the back there's a fold-out holder for face-up output that will stack in reverse order to those pages you let the FS-1000 deposit in the standard tray on top of the unit's main body and offer a straight paper path for OHP transparencies and label sheets.

Under the hood there's an impressive set of electronics. The brain is a 75Mhz PowerPC processor which benefits from a standard install of 4Mb of RAM and can be expanded to a maximum of 132Mb. Beware, though, for this is pricey, with a 64Mb DIMM upgrade setting you back as much as the printer itself. Combined, the processor and standard allocation of memory help it to pump out a steady 10 text pages a minute with a standard five per cent coverage in our tests, and the results were good. At the standard 600dpi setting characters were crisp and dark. Speed demons can drop this to 300dpi, or you can opt for the Kyocera Image Refinement 2 setting and up the ante to 1200dpi. Splashing out on the 8Mb FS-1000 doesn't up the quoted print speed, however, so it's the engine itself rather than the buffer that is setting the 10ppm limit.

Print quality is difficult to fault. Images were well rendered and our set of standard PowerPoint test slides, printed on generic paper, had even toner distribution, and text-based characters as small as 2pt were easy to read. Our 50-page Acrobat test document was cleanly produced and spot colours in the included clip-art were translated into well-differentiated greyscale equivalents. Throughout our tests, the FS-1000 was quiet in use, making less noise than the fan in our test PC.

It has five built-in printer emulations, including Epson LQ-850 and PCL6, and optional support for PostScript Level 2 through an emulation CDRom. Interfaces for serial connection and, at £229, a device to hook the printer to a 10/100BaseTX ethernet network without an external print server box, are also available. The really clever thing, though, especially if you take the network option, is Kyocera's Remote Operation Panel (ROP). This effectively makes up for the lack of a screen on the unit itself, letting you monitor every aspect of its operation. Open up one of the external doors and the spinning image on your screen will open its door to match. Run low on toner and it'll warn you so you don't end up walking across the room to collect your print job only to find a pile of empty pages. A directory tree interface lets you navigate the various settings and options, specifying print resolutions and ecology settings. Our only complaint was the speed at which it worked.

It's all fine and well having a pretty image spinning on the interface but it made the whole thing less responsive. We soon found ourselves becoming irritated, too, at the way in which it would slowly fade settings and stats onto the panel as it probed them rather than just displaying them right away. That said, these are minor points and you are in no way obliged to use the ROP which is, at the end of the day, just an added bonus.

The FS-1000 is not expensive to run. The £54 toner cartridge has a quoted life of 6000 pages if you follow the five per cent coverage rule, which those with calculators will no doubt already have worked out averages at 0.9 pence per page, which Kyocera claims makes it a penny a page cheaper to run than HP's LaserJet 1100. The all-in-one process unit, which comprises the drum and developer, carries a 100,000-page, three-year warranty, so if guaranteed uptime is important to you this may be an attractive choice.

It's also a good one for the greens. Kyocera's Ecosys regime cuts down on wastage with a fully reusable drum that just needs topping up with toner and a bit of regular maintenance when it's returned to the factory.

Contact:Kyocera 0118 931 1500