Epson AcuLaser C900

I bought this Epson Aculaser C900 printer as a replacement for my sick inkjet printer. I also run a very old Canon LBP 1260 (an HP Laserjet 4+ in disguise) which is fantastic. It meets my black and white needs and I really wanted someting that would do colour without fuss.

I found the C900 on offer from Printer Database for £250 with a free inkjet printer thrown in. I sold the inkjet unopened for £80 so I got the new laser printer for £170 which was pretty amazing at the time.

The C900 printer is big and heavy. I have it on a trolley but don't move it around much. It sets up very easily and once you have removed all the packing and odd bits of tape it works right away, albeit with a lot of loud noises and looking as if it might like to leap about a bit. I have found that if you buy high quality brilliant white laser paper colour photographs print really well. Unlike inkjet output, copies are dry when they come out of the machine. Quality is pleasing though colours could be a little brighter. On occasions I have used this printer for black and white and have found the print to be heavy and blurred in comparison with the sharp output of my Canon.

I don't use the C900 a lot. In two years I have done just over 500 copies and the starter cartridges are not yet empty. I do wonder if I should decide to sell it and look for another good buy sooner rather than later so I sell it as a going concern without buying replacement toner.

I am a light user of printers these days and for me this machine might seem like overkill. However, it has been reliable and economical over the time I have had it. I am uncertain how good it would be in business, given the cost of consumables, with even a set of compatible cartridges costing around £200.

The Epson Aculaser C900 is a quality printer for a small business. Cheap to buy and a very reliable workhorse. I've not had any problems in 18 months of ownership and seems such a shame to throw it away, but that is what I have to do. The hideouos cost of replacing the toner cartridges means it is cheaper to buy a new printer. The plus side is I have now bought a more up-to-date printer, the C1100, for £249.99. To buy three colour and one black cartridge and a new photoconductor, which all went simultaneously after 12,028 pages (3,481 of which were colour) costs about £170 more than buying a new printer.

The Epson Aculaser C900 was the first colour laser printer I have bought for home/small office use. The thing is heavy, but I don't move it other than to unjam paper and load up consumables.

Epson seem to treat small business users with contempt. The cost of consumables is more than a new printer and they all seem to run out at the same time.

Had an inkjet printer previously and the Epson Aculaser C900 is a huge improvement. Put in a new black cartridge which was very easy to do. Now found that I can get bottles of toner refills which cost one third of the price.

Obviously, Epson don't want people to know this so that they can sell more expensive products!

Having had a Aculaser C1000 for a long time I was happy to try an Aculaser C900. Actually I bought a C900N, with a network card. The network never software is a disaster, it does not work, and Epson costumer help is another disaster. Also it comes with a toner that has a brief life, and the replacement is too expensive, and it has to be done too soon after purchase. A disapointment. Epson never more!

I was too trusting of a very good name! Initially I was delighted with my purchase - vibrant colours especially. The joy was short-lived as soon as I tried to print a flat 15% yellow backwash. The result of this and all similar attempts with all colours was truly dreadful - stripey and banded, particularly within an inch or two of the edges. Full marks to the Epson engineers who gave me 3 visits, and swapped everything out including the laser itself - to no avail. If you want to print letters, graphs and primary colours then this is a great printer, but don't attempt anything subtle!

Just another annoyance - the driver seems to get frequently confused over how many copies it should be printing. Have now given-up and am looking out for a grown-up colour laser.

Initially I thought I had found a sensible and cheap departmental colour laser and bought 5 Epson Aculaser C900.

However, the consumables don't last long and are expensive which is presumably why the printer price is so low (I calculated that a full set of consumables would cost considerably more than a new printer).

The reliability is also poor, I've had the printers 18 months(ish) and two have now failed, a call to Epson deduced an expensive engineering repair (after eating several of those expensive consumables).

Anyway the new Oki's look good...

At only £399 including VAT for this Epson Aculaser C900 colour laser printer, it's really quite hard to fault it for the money.

It's only recently that the prices have come down for colour lasers, so they are now in the price range for the small office.

We have only just recently bought our third C900, having had several of the older Epson C1000 printers before.

Needing to get another laser, my first intentions were to get another C1000, but they had unfortunately been replaced by the smaller (and cheaper) C900 so we thought we would give it a try. Luckily for us, the gamble has definately paid off.

The printer is of average size for a printer of this type (about the size of a 21" TV) so can just about fit on a desk, but we found it far better to stick ours on a small table beside the desk. It is best to get someone to help when you have to move it though, as it weighs nearly 30kg.

It takes a couple of minutes to power on and get itself sorted out for printing, but thats not really a problem if you switch it on at the same time as the computer itself. The starting routine is a bit noisy though, but the actual printing noise isn't really excessive.

One thing we have found is that the Toner Cartridges are quite a bit smaller than the older C1000, so you can't print quite as many pages per cartridge as before.

It costs approx £60 (inc VAT) for a new black Toner Cartridge and up to a £110 (inc VAT) for each of the colour toners (Cyan, Magenta and Yellow) so the strange thing is that it is not much more expensive to buy a new printer than it is to replace a full set of toners, especially if you are getting towards the end of the Drum and any other consumables as well.

I have been told by someone at PC World that the toners that come with the printer aren't as full as the replacement ones. I dont know if this is accurate or not, but I personally havent seen much of a difference, after all, you can only fit so much powder in a plastic tube.

As to the printer itself, it comes in a big box, so it can be a bit of a tight squeeze getting it into a car. The only way I could do it was to fold down the front passenger seat and squeeze it in and then onto the back seat with the box sat on top of the flat front seat. Not ideal, but hadn't thought of taking it out of the box and binning the packaging. Know better for next time.

The printer has both normal parallel and USB connection, so is very easy to set up, with no problems in both Windows 98 and XP. The printer has a paper capacity of 200 sheets of paper, so you don't have to keep it up all the time.

When it comes to replacing the toners, they are very straight forward to change, with just pulling the used one out (they stand out a mile where they are after opening the front cover) and pushing the new cartridge in. The printer then takes about a minute going through all it's checks, clunking and whurring away, and then it's back to printing. Be aware that small fingers would be an advantage as the holes to pull the old Cartridge out are fairly small.

It has a resolution of 600 dpi x 600 dpi, giving very good quality prints, with the solid shades of colour being very sharp and there being no visible signs of banding.

It is capable of taking a variety of types of media, with most of our usage being for printing CD Labels, which print with no problems concerning the labels themselves.

We have had some problems with other colour laser printers and CD Labels, primarily to do with the heat generated, but so far we haven't ever had a problem with any of our C900's. They have also all been very reliable to date, with absolutely no down time due to faults.

The specs say a printing speed of 16 pages per minute of Black and White and 4 pages per minute for colour documents, which seems quite accurate in the real world, with B&W prints starting within a few seconds of pressing Print to up to 1 minute for a full colour page. Not extremely fast for the colour start, but, for the money, whats a few seconds between friends?

Another little extra is that Epson regularly have promotional offers of free software or hardware when you buy the printer, but this isn't particularly well advertised, so look carefully through all the paperwork as you get it out of the box.

Overall, I am very happy with our C900's, and would strongly recommend them to anyone who has the space and high printing needs for a colour laser printer.