Sharp AL-1530CS

This MFD from Sharp is a monochrome Laser printer and copier and colored flatbed scanner. The flatbed can take paper up to legal size, which is larger than the usual A4 size paper. For copying the zoom range is 25% - 400%. It connects to the computer by both parallel port and USB, but with the parallel port you cannot use the scanner feature. The input tray can hold 250 pages at one time, which is adequate for most printing requirements. 

On the performance front we got 11 ppm for full-page monochrome text, which is slightly lower than its rated 12 ppm. But the copying speeds were the same as the rated 15 ppm, which was the best among all. On the scanning front it took 7 secs to do a preview and 10 secs for a full scan of monochrome text sheet. These timings were again the best among all. For a full page colored graphics it took it took 15 secs for the preview and 55 secs for full scan, which is slightly more then some others. The quality of the prints, copies and scans was very good and the text was clear and crisp.

Looking at the specs and performance, this is a good MFD for workgroup of about 10 users, but due to lack of any networking capabilities, it has to be connected on one system and then shared among others. Overall, a good printer, copier and scanner with good speeds and quality but the price seems to be slightly more. 

Anoop Mangla