Kyocera Ecosys M5526cdw
A feature-packed laser MFP offering flexible access controls and easy-tomanage running costs
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £306 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk
Kyocera’s Ecosys M5226cdw aims to minimise the hassle of maintenance: on top of the standard two-year, on-site warranty, the print drum and developer are covered for three years or 100,000 pages. The only things you’ll need to keep an eye on for the foreseeable future are its four toner cartridges.
The device provides print, copy, scan and fax functions, and unusually it can support both wired and wireless network connections at once. At £306, it’s very affordable, and print costs work out to a mere 1.3p per mono page and 9p for colour prints.
The laser engine is rated at a true 1,200dpi, but Kyocera makes clear that taking full advantage of this resolution may have an impact on print speed. In practice, our test Word documents were delivered at 26ppm regardless of resolution, but our 24-page colour DTP test saw a big variation in print speed. At 600dpi the document came out at the promised 26ppm, but switching to high-quality 1,200dpi mode saw the overall speed fall to only 12ppm.
The good news is that the Ecosys M5226cdw produces punchy, eye-catching business graphics and sharp colour photos with excellent detail. Text was pin sharp even at tiny sizes, while our mono photos showed plenty of detail even in darker areas.
The flatbed scanner delivers great output quality too, and its 50-age ADF motored through a single-sided ten -page document at 24ppm. Doublesided scanning is much slower, however: here, performance dropped to 7ppm, even though the scanner is a true duplex model and scans both sides of a page in one pass.
The M5226cdw has a comparatively small colour touchscreen, measuring 10.9cm across the diagonal, but its menus are neatly organised and very accessible. Kyocera’s Command Center RX web interface also provides an at–a-glance status view of
“You can assign a PIN to confidential jobs – which can either be deleted after printing or stored for further use”
consumables, plus easy access to an extensive range of features. That includes the One Touch Key feature, which accelerates walk-up scan operations. You can create email, network share and FTP destinations from the web interface, which then pop up on the printer’s touchscreen for quick selection.
There’s also full support for Google Cloud Print, so we were able to swiftly register the MFP for remote document printing. AirPrint is ready out of the box and we had no problems using it on our iPad, along with Kyocera’s free iOS printing and scanning apps.
The Mobile Print app provides additional options for printing documents, photos or web pages and pulling in scans. We used Kyocera’s MyPanel iOS app to send scans to (and print files from) our Evernote, Dropbox and OneDrive accounts; you can also browse the MFP’s address book and send scans directly to a shared folder on a connected PC.
While the driver offers extensive security features, you’ll need to install an SD card in the printer to make use of them. We inserted a 1GB card and were then able to store public print jobs on it as copies for frequent use, ensure multiple-copy print runs were verified with Print and Hold and assign a PIN to confidential jobs – which can either be deleted after printing or stored for further use.
Enable job accounting at the web console and you can also control print, scan and copy operations, block colour usage and apply page limits. Each printer driver must be manually configured to use job accounting – you can either provide each user with an ID or ask them to enter it in a pop-up window prior to printing.
While high-quality colour printing isn’t as fast as it might be, there’s otherwise very little to criticise about the Ecosys M5526cdw: it’s a affordable and easily maintained colour MFP with business-grade access controls and great output quality.
SPECIFICATIONS
1,200dpi A4 colour laser MFP 600dpi colour flatbed A4 scanner 800MHz CPU 512MB RAM (max 1.5GB) 26ppm mono/colour 10.9cm colour touchscreen 2 x USB 2 Gigabit Ethernet 802.11n wireless 33.6Kbps fax/modem 2 x RJ-11 SD card slot duplex; 250-page input tray 50-page MPT 50-page ADF average monthly duty cycle: 1,667 pages 417 x 429 x 495mm (WDH)
26kg 2yr on-site warranty
RUNNING COSTS (EXC VAT)
Mono (4K pages), £54 C, Y, M (3K pages), £76 each. Overall cost per A4 page: mono, 1.3p; colour, 9p