Product Details
More commonly associated with mobile phones, Sagem has been diversifying into several new territories. It made a frontal assault on the hotly contested business laser printer market this year. The range consists of mono and colour lasers, and the latest MF 5401 delivers a basic multifunction solution to small businesses.
The MF 5401 offers a mixed bag of features, because it's built around a 600dpi, 16ppm mono laser engine, but has a colour scanner stacked on top. The scanner can function as a straightforward mono copier, but is obviously more limited for colour operations. For the latter, you can scan a colour image and import it directly to the local host PC, or pop a USB storage device in the port at the front and send it directly to this. The printer doesn't accept a network print server card, but Sagem offers a wireless network dongle that uses the front USB port.
A handy security feature is the card reader located underneath the front panel of the printer. During the warm-up phase, you must insert the supplied initialisation card; otherwise, the printer can't be used, and once accepted the card can then be removed. The only consumable is the toner cartridge, which is loaded from the front of the printer. Printing costs depend on which cartridge you choose, but neither delivers particularly good value.
