Quality Choice for Value Needs.

My office had an account on a very large copy machine shared between everyone on our floor. The department which owned the contract for that machine was unfortunately moved into a different building. So we needed to find other options for our photocopying needs.

We do not do a lot of copying. The only large scale copying I personally need to do is when I put together research fellow nomination packets for our board to vote on. I do this less than 6 times a year so it is not a big problem if I don't have maximum efficiency when this happens. So when I looked at the price for signing one of our university photocopier contracts (it would have been well over $1000 for the year each year), I decided that it was just not worth it. So we picked up this Sharp copier. It cost us about $350 with our university discount. Getting a replacement toner cartridge and drum cost about $175 with the university pricing. Paper is a fraction of a cent per sheet. When I compared the costs it was immediately clear to me that this was a far more economical approach.

When the photocopier came in the first thing I was concerned with was setup complexity. There effectively was none. As with any desktop printer several pieces were taped down, but they were all very evident. I was able to follow the sheet of illustrated instructions to set everything up with no problems or confusion.

Once I had the printer set up and I put paper in the lower tray, like I would any laser printer or other photocopier I tried to photocopy a page by just pressing the green button. Nothing happened. I noticed the number of copies said 0, so I tried to up it to 1. Again, it wouldn't work. I was worried that the unit may be bad, which would have been a miserable pile of paperwork for me. After some searching I found out that the photocopier defaults to the paper source being the side paper tray. It is a tray that just folds out and you can set paper in. It is not a drawer. Having this as the default, and having a $350-400 dollar copier/printer that is incapable of detecting which trays are full and which aren't is a little annoying. Even the most basic HP laser printers have this capability. Once I changed the paper source, everything printed beautifully. It provides very high resolution laser quality digital copies. One of our visiting scholars needed to print a multi page document. Everything went off without a hitch, and in fact her copies were a little bit easier to read than her originals. She was very impressed by this.

I have unfortunately not been able to figure out how to do dual sided photocopies. This is a problem, especially because there are instructions in the book for duplexing, but the reference lights and buttons that are not on the copier. In addition there is an entire section on connecting the photocopier with your computer and there are no ports on the copier that would allow for this. All I can think is that there are two versions of this model and I got the less expensive simple one. I have no problem with this division, and for our office even if the division had been apparent I likely would have ordered the less expensive model. I do have problems with the homogenized instruction manual that doesn't seem to differentiate at all between the varieties of this copier it is distributed with. I find this to be exceptionally lazy, and I'm sure that it has caused problems with less technically inclined users.

With all of that said, it is a very well priced copier, that seems to provide reliable copying, exceptionally high quality, and it has a very sturdy body. If you are on a budget and want something simple to make copies it is an excellent buy. It is too slow for high volume copying, and lacks the features for dynamic quality choices when making copies. So if you think you are going to do a lot of volume and seriously need duplex copying more than on very rare occasions I do not recommend this model.

For our needs it is nearly perfect, and for small office needs almost anywhere it would also be wonderfully suited.