Digital Technology News, Camera, Camcorder and Cool Gadget Reviews

Adding an automatic document feeder (ADF) to a scanner is a great way to capture multiple documents with the minimum of fuss. Plustek has a reputation for producing low-cost products, so it had a chance to undercut the competition with its SmartOffice PS286 Plus.

The PS286 Plus comes with several spare parts and a software package that includes optical character recognition (OCR), business card and image-management applications. Although it’s not aimed strictly at use on the road, it’s supplied with a hard-wearing bag.

The scanner has a flip-up input tray with two sets of adjustable paper guides and a fold-down output tray. The output tray feels sturdy, but the input tray is made from a flimsy silver plastic.

The TWAIN driver is easy to use, but you must manually select simplex or duplex scanning, colour or mono. We received further driver warning messages during a multi-page duplex job, after which we discovered that a side of one sheet failed to scan and the auto-rotate hadn’t worked.

Kyocera Mita’s FS-C5150DN is a workgroup colour laser printer that’s broadly competing with the OKI C310DN and Brother’s HL-4140CN.

It’s a single-pass device, laying down black, cyan, magenta and yellow images at once to produce a full-colour sheet at the same rate as a monochrome one. It has an Ethernet port for network sharing and a built-in duplexer so it can print automatically on both sides of a sheet.
Kyocera’s low-cost printers have become more competitive, but the FS-C51SODN seems like a breakthrough. While it’s not the cheapest printer in its class, its specification is impressive, with PCL support and PostScript 3 emulation, plus support for PDF and XPS direct print. There’s a quick 667MHz processor and a generous 256MB of RAM, even if the 21 pages-per-minute speed is a shade behind the competition.
Furthermore, there’s plenty of scope to upgrade. Paper handling can be improved with one or two 500-sheet cassettes for a maximum 1,300-sheet input capacity, memory can be upgraded up to 1,280MB, and there are optional wireless network, fibre-optic and gigabit Ethernet interfaces. Read the rest of this entry »