lfeagan wrote:Eh, not bad loooking. Any experience with this printer? (The Kyocera)
I had the predecessor of the 1000 series, the Kyocera FS-600. Terrible machine. I wouldn't buy a Kyocera anytime again soon.
Right from the beginning the printer produced paper jams around every twentieth page. Being on the second toner cartridge, after about half a year and only roughly 4.000 pages printed, the opacity of the toner, starting from the right side of the paper, started to fade. After another hundred pages, the print-outs were almost completely blank, even though a new toner cartridge had been inserted just before. I had to take the printing unit (PU-16, it's the combination of the toner cartridge and the permanent drum) out of the machine and shake it so that at least on the next ten or twenty print-outs toner was visible.
During three years of warranty service, the printer had been under repair six times in total, that is for roughly about three months. A lot of components had been changed and the PU had been replaced several times for a completely new one. But the problems I described above were never resolved. Paper jams still occured frequently and after a thousand print-outs, toner started to fade again. Several different service contractors tried their luck on the machine but to no avail. When I had a look at offerings on ebay in the following years, I saw a myriad of such printers which were described as having exactly the same symptoms (paper jams and toner opacity). One current example, this was expected to be a 100% black page:
http://www.kleber-the-family.de/bilder/fs-600-2.jpg
http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie ... 03400&rd=1
Don't get me wrong: The people from the service contractors and, ultimately, the Kyocera headquarters were nice and friendly and really willing to help, but with such poor quality of engineering, they weren't able to do anything about it. I once received a
beautiful ball-point pen from them that I still use regularly, but the printer itself had made its way to the dumpster long ago.
I mainly bought this printer because of the, as it was advertised, long-living drum which should last for around 100.000 pages on the smaller and even 300.000 pages on the business-class printers. But already after 4.000 pages, the printer was a complete piece of junk. And it never produced a print quality that was in any respect comparable to HP LaserJets with the Canon engines. When a year ago my university got some of the larger FS-3xxx-series Kyoceras, I could witness that at least the print quality still lagged behind (jagged, fuzzy instead of razor-sharp edges on the fonts).
Now, in addition to some newer printers (also from HP, because of the good experiences I had with this brand), I'm still using a 12-year-old 600-dpi LaserJet 4 at home that I received from my father after I got rid of the Kyocera. The print quality of this old machine can even compare to that of any of today's laser printers. With the toner cartridges that, in contrast to the Kyocera design, contain the drum, the print quality is like that of a factory-new printer with every cartridge change (and cartridges aren't really too expensive, either).
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I need some advice on reliability or any other issues you might be familiar with or other advice on laser printers.
