Panasonic BBBKXCL Instruction Manual

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PANASONIC

Better Buys

for Business

WORTH

WATCHING

2003

Panasonic WORKiO KX-CL500 Panasonic WORKiO KX-CL500D Panasonic WORKiO KX-CL510 Panasonic WORKiO KX-CL510D

17ppm full color 21ppm black & white

Sum-up: Exciting, new low-cost workgroup printer with good features and low operating costs.

Just as this guide was going to press, Panasonic announced this new letter/legal-size color laser printer series. It’s a big step for the company, which has in the past had rather lackluster models. The whole family has good features and good prices, as well as an exceptionally small footprint. One warning: we weren’t able to get a look at color quality before press time, so we suggest that you compare output from this unit with that of some of its closer competitors.

The base price for this line is $1,599, which puts it in a select but growing group of printers. However, few in this price range can match this family’s performance. At 17ppm in color and 21ppm in black and white, this is definitely a fast machine, as fast as many far more expensive printers. It also has built-in Ethernet, even on the lowest priced model.

Versions: There are four mod-

els in the WORKiO KX-CL500 family:

● The KX-CL500, the base model

($1,599)

WORTH

ATCHIN

2003

Panasonic WORKiO KX-CL500 — This letter-

sized model combines impressive power and

● The KX-CL500D ($1,899), which adds

automatic duplex

● The KX-CL510 ($1,949), a PostScript-

equipped model without duplexing

● The KX-CL510D, the duplex version of

that model ($2,249).

All of the models have some excellent standard features. Ethernet connectivity, along with USB and parallel ports, is built in. All have embedded Web servers with remote administration and maintenance tools. All have PCL 5c as a standard feature. And all models offer an optional 10GB internal hard drive.

Note that full speed is available at 600dpi resolution only. At 1,200dpi, things slow down to 8.4 pages a minute. This may be a big concern to some, but we believe 600dpi is good enough for most users.

features with a very reasonable price.

Worth

Watching

Reprint

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Paper capacity is pretty good. You start with a 100sheet multipurpose tray and 530-sheet drawer. You can add one or two added 530-sheet drawers. That’s a total of 1,690 sheets of paper capacity. Quite good in this price range. Output capacity is the usual 250 sheets.

The base unit has 64MB of memory; the other three units start with 128MB, so they handle PostScript jobs

Panasonic WORKiO KX-CL500 Consumables costs at-a-glance

Price

Yield

Full-color

cost per page

Black-and-white

cost per page

and duplex printing more easily. Memory can be expanded to 512MB, appropriate for this class of printer.

The unit as a whole is quite compact and rather light for a color laser printer (under 66 lbs.) Consumables costs are among the lowest in the industry. We calculate the black cost per page as around 1.5¢ and the color cost as 8.8¢. That’s better than some close competitors, notably the Hewlett-Packard Color LaserJet 4600 and the Xerox Phaser 6200.

We believe this printer is a strong contender, with reasonable consumables prices, a low sticker price, and good features. We do recommend that you check out its quality firsthand, however, as we haven’t seen any output samples yet.

The WORKiO KX-CL500 series models receive our Wor th Watching designation.

Black toner

Cyan toner

Magenta toner

Yellow toner

Print cartridge/black

Print cartridge/ 3-color

Fuser

Waste toner cartridge/black

Waste toner cartridge/color

Accumulator unit

Transfer roller

TOTAL PER-PAGE COSTS

$24.00 5,000 $0.005 $0.005

$72.00 5,000 $0.014 N/A

$86.00 13,000 $0.007 $0.007

$359.00 13,000 $0.028 N/A

$196.00 100,000 $0.002 $0.002

$11.00 24,000 N/A $0.000

$11.00 6,000 $0.002 N/A

$120.00 83,000 $0.001 $0.001

$16.00 100,000 $0.000 $0.000

$0.0876 $0.0154

8.76¢ 1.54¢

Panasonic

Secaucus, NJ

800 742 8086

www.panasonic.com

Panasonic sells color printers under its own name using engines made by its parent company, Matsushita. Panasonic has not yet had much impact on the market with its own brand-name models, and it’s been in and out of the market in recent years.

Panasonic sells its color laser printers through both traditional office equipment dealers — Panasonic copier dealers, in particular — and wholesale printer channels.

Excerpted from The Color Laser Printer and Busi- ness Ink Jet Printer Guides, volume 148, November

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