Kyocera Mita FS-C5300DN

Kyocera Mita FS-C5300DN

Speed and economy are this model's strengths; its color quality is acceptable for mainstream business use. Kyocera Mita's FS-C5300DN color laser printer is very fast, and its consumables have an extraordinarily low cost. It's well worth considering for a high-volume office's color needs--if the color is for pie charts and accents, rather than for good-quality photos. The FS-C5300DN is one of the fastest color lasers we've tested. It printed plain, black text pages at a rate of 27.1 pages per minute. Printing various kinds of graphics, it outpaced the pack in all but one test. Color image quality was adequate but unsophisticated. Solid blocks of color, such as in pie charts, looked fine, but color photographs tended to look grainy or fuzzy, and a yellowish cast affected most pictures slightly. Grayscale images struggled with subtle gradations and looked too dark overall. Lexmark's C734dn came close in speed and produced oversaturated, but generally better, print quality. The FS-C5300DN's generous standard equipment includes 500-sheet input and output trays, plus a 150-sheet multipurpose tray. All are commendably sturdy.