Kyocera Mita KM-8030 review

Kyocera, the printer maker, married Mita, the copier company, eight years ago and, although all its high-end printers are sold under the Kyocera brand, there's more than a little of the departmental photocopier about the KM-8030. Given the facilities of this multifunction machine, its basic size seems quite modest. It can handle A3 sheets with ease - both printing and scanning - and prints A4 pages in landscape mode for increased throughput.

The machine comes as standard with five paper trays: two 1,500-sheet A4 trays sit side by side under the printer engine, with two 'universal' trays, capable of taking paper up to A3, below those. There's a multi-purpose tray at the side of the device, which can take a further 100 sheets of paper or card up to 200gsm.

On top of the printer section is a flatbed scanner, which can take A3 sheets, too. The Auto Document Feeder (ADF) takes up to 200-sheets and can scan both sides of each sheet in a single pass, with it duplex scanning heads.

This is as much a standalone copier as it is a printer or scanner and scan and copy jobs are controlled by a large, blue and white touchscreen, which can be tilted back and forward for optimum viewing. Kyocera Mita has made a good job of the screen design, with plenty of well-drawn icons and animation. Open the front cover of the machine, for example, and you're given instructions on clearing paper jams - though we didn't have occasion to clear any while testing the KM-8030.

As well as choosing common job types from touch menus, such as printing two pages on one sheet or producing duplex documents from single-sided originals, you can define your own special tasks, which can be saved on the machine and recalled each time you want to use them. Although there's no facility for secure 'walk-up' printing from a flash drive, you can direct a job to the printer and hold it until you're at the control panel and have entered a password, before printing. This is useful for printing confidential documents in a departmental setting.