Fast, efficient and well-built all-rounder for small offices
In use, the device is faster than many comparable colour laser MFDs. Our tests revealed that a single-sided A4 Microsoft Word text document, whether mono or colour, took 21 seconds to print. Printing 10 copies took just 48 seconds, meaning that after the first sheet, the remaining copies took a mere 3 seconds each.
Sturdy ADF with smooth-sliding paper width guides
Printing in duplex is much slower per sheet, of course, because of the extra paper handling involved. In our tests, one double-sided Word document took 48 seconds to print, after which subsequent duplex copies took 9 seconds each.
Using the ADF to make copies with the scanner took about 26 seconds for one sheet, or just 52 seconds for 10 copies. Again, making copies in mono or colour made no difference to the output speed.
Print quality was consistently good, limited only by its 600dpi resolution. Text and graphics were generally crisp, but began to fill out or break up in areas of very fine detail. Continuous tones were reasonable with only the occasional banding effect, but there was no evidence of moiré effects at all. The FS-C1020MFP is not a photo printer but its picture output, for example on web pages, is decent enough for a 600dpi colour laser.
The scanner is also a 600dpi device, which is more than enough resolution for office tasks and certainly good enough for quality image capture too. No optical character recognition (OCR) software is bundled with the unit, unfortunately, but nor are you burdened with heaps of 'funny photo' and greetings card crap either, so it's a fair trade-off.
Printouts land face-up, emerging underneath the control panel.
The scanning lamp warms up extremely quickly, in just a few seconds, which is really important for an office copier. Regrettably, manual scanning can be a very slow process indeed, using the supplied TWAIN driver. Running a preview scan of the whole A4 plate can take 13 seconds, after which the TWAIN driver spends another minute actually drawing the preview on-screen. Scanning at the optical resolution is then an excuse to nip to the kitchen for a cup of tea: even a little 6x4in photo took 3.5 minutes to scan at 600dpi.
Sponsored: Global IT security risks report