Touted as offering rock-bottom cost of ownership, Kyocera’s FS-C5025N is a 20ppm (pages per minute) colour laser with an 85,000 page per month duty cycle, which is beefy enough to be used as a small company or workgroup laser.

USB and Ethernet interfaces come as standard, with the usual multiprotocol print server emulations, together with web and SNMP management.

Paper is fed from a 500-sheet A4 drawer with a fold-out multipurpose tray to handle transparencies, card and other awkward materials.

A further three trays can then be added underneath (£188 ex Vat each), bringing the printer’s capacity up to 2,000 sheets altogether. Other optional extras include a duplexer (£215 ex Vat) and a powered envelope feeder (£189 ex Vat).

All this makes for an impressive printer – although nothing outstanding, with lots of alternatives available capable of matching or exceeding what the FS-C5025N has to offer. However, few can match the low cost of ownership, with toner being the only consumable required in day-to-day operation.

Four cartridges are involved (cyan, yellow, magenta and black), each clicking quickly into place under the lift-up top. The original starter cartridges are good for about 4,000 pages (at five per cent coverage), but replacements can cope with double that.

The £300 ex Vat price tag may seem a little hefty but, unlike most other colour lasers, there’s nothing else to buy, other than a maintenance kit to service the long-life optical drum every 200,000 prints or so (£450 ex Vat). Added to this, the toner that needs to be replenished most often (black) sells for just £53.88 ex Vat – less than on some mono lasers.

According to Kyocera, taking this approach can drastically reduce running costs, especially if you cost it over three to five years (the typical life of this kind of printer). Indeed, if you believe the comparison tools on the Kyocera website, you could save hundreds of pounds compared with the leading brands, even when you factor in the cost of the hardware and warranty terms.

On the downside, the print quality – although good – is far from exceptional. Designers and other graphics professionals will soon find faults, especially with the resolution, but then they are not the printer’s target market. This is a general-purpose laser printer and for printing general-purpose documents, it’s more than adequate.

The FS-C5025N is also pretty quick to print, taking about 13 seconds to eject the first page of any document sent its way and printing boring old text at a rapid rate. More complex pages naturally take a lot longer, but the PowerPC-based controller coped well, even when we tried the booklet printing and watermark options.

We liked this machine a lot and we also appreciated the way it looks. Design, of course, will always be a matter of taste, but to our eyes the FS-C5025N is one of the neatest looking network lasers around. This is mainly because Kyocera has eschewed fancy plastic mouldings in favour of a no-nonsense cube, which simply gets on with the job. A clear operator display is another plus, accompanied by large, easy-to-understand control buttons.

OK, it may not get the pulse racing, but it works and if it lives up to Kyocera’s claims, it could save you a packet of money to boot.