The Kyocera Mita FS-C5300DN colour laser printer is very fast, and its consumables have an extraordinarily low cost.
It's well worth considering for a high-volume office's colour needs - if the colour is for pie charts and accents, rather than for good-quality photos.
The Kyocera Mita FS-C5300DN is one of the fastest colour 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.
Colour image quality was adequate but unsophisticated with the Kyocera Mita FS-C5300DN. Solid blocks of colour, such as in pie charts, looked fine, but colour 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. The Lexmark C734dn came close in speed and produced oversaturated, but generally better, print quality.
The Kyocera Mita FS-C5300DN's generous standard equipment includes 500-sheet input and output trays, plus a 150-sheet multipurpose tray. All are commendably sturdy. Automatic duplexing works for both letter- and legal-size paper.
An optional 500-sheet input tray is available. A front USB port is available for use with key drives. The front control panel is usable but would have been helped by a few more button labels, and the menus on the Kyocera Mita FS-C5300DN's 2-line, 16-character, monochrome LCD could have offered a few more navigational cues.
Kyocera Mita's long-life consumables make the Kyocera Mita FS-C5300DN a cheap printer to maintain. The photoconducting drums (one for each colour) and toner supplies are separated to minimise waste.
The drums last 200,000 pages apiece, so it will take you a while to get through those. The starter-size toner supplies are hardly skimpy: 6000 pages for black (K) and 5000 pages for cyan (C), magenta (M), and yellow (Y).
The actual price you pay for the toner (and the printer) may vary. Kyocera Mita printers are available only through authorised dealers, who set the purchase price and often include value-added options such as discounted consumables or on-site repairs beyond the warranty period. The Kyocera Mita FS-C5300DN had a lofty list price.
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