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It may come as a surprise to some people that when GCC started life in 1981, its main line of business was developing enhancements for coin-operated video games.
The company moved on to designing printer products for the flourishing Apple Macintosh market in 1984, but it's only now, with the introduction of the Elite range of mono laser printers, that GCC has decided to make a move on the PC-based market.
The Elite 21 series looks to be good value, with prices starting at £999 and, all three models offering print speeds of 21ppm and a top true resolution of 1200dpi (dots per inch).
A welcome feature is the built-in dual-speed network adaptor. At this price many vendors only offer a print server as an optional extra, which can easily add an extra £200 to the asking price. In fact, the Elite range offers a comprehensive collection of interfaces, as you also get parallel, serial and USB ports.
The Elite 21DN on review uses a Fuji Xerox print engine and comes equipped with an 80Mhz PowerPC processor. Its 32Mb of memory can be upgraded to 256Mb using industry-standard Simms. This is fortunate, as we found the printer failed on memory overruns during testing at the highest resolution. Both PCL6 And PostScript 2 emulations are supported and the 21DN adds an internal duplex unit to the recipe for double-sided printing.
Physically, the 21DN is unremarkable and does little to stand out in a sea of beige, plastic, cube-shaped printers. Standard paper capacity from the single lower tray is 550 sheets of A4, while a multipurpose tray has room for another 100 sheets or up to 10 envelopes.
Paper capacity can be increased significantly by adding up to two optional 550-sheet lower trays (£235 ex VAT each). The large toner cartridge (£155 ex VAT) has a lifespan of 15,000 pages at five per cent coverage, which equates to reasonable printing costs of a shade over one pence per page.
This compares well with much of the competition, although Kyocera still holds sway as its 18ppm FS-3750 can deliver a page for only 0.3 pence, delivering big savings over a number of years.
Configuring the 21DN for network printing is not the easiest task, as GCC doesn't provide sophisticated management tools such as Hewlett Packard's JetAdmin or Lexmark's MarkVision.
The printer is designed to be managed over an intranet or the internet and uses a web-based interface called WebAdmin. After manually assigning an IP address from the control panel you can use GCC's Map utility. This searches the network for GCC printers and displays them ready for selection.
Choose the one you want to manage and it will fire up that device's web interface. From here you can view and configure all the printer settings that are available from the control panel such as the default resolution, paper sizes and toner density.
Unfortunately, you can't view the status of consumables so there's no way of remotely checking how much toner is left or the amount of paper in each tray.
Text quality at 600dpi is easily good enough for most users, with even the smallest fonts looking pin sharp, but you'll be hard pushed to spot any improvements at 1200dpi. Graphics quality will depend on which driver you choose. We found the PCL6 driver produced unacceptably murky images using the default driver settings and required a lot of work with the density controls to improve it.
It is far easier to go with the PostScript driver as the results even at 600dpi were far superior with good levels of detail, smooth greyscales and virtually no banding. The 21DN failed to complete the same tests at 1200dpi, although a closer examination of the portion that it did manage to print showed small improvements in detail and contrast.
Print speeds for text-only documents were close to the quoted speeds, with a 28-page Word document delivered in 84 seconds for a tidy 20ppm. Running the same document through the duplex unit returned a reasonable 13ppm. Heavily formatted documents caused a few problems - a DTP-style document with large graphics and pictures dropped speed down to 14.5ppm at 600dpi and the 21DN failed to complete the same test at 1200dpi.
With the launch of the Elite 21DN, GCC is moving into an area of intense competition, although for a 21ppm laser with built-in networking and duplex unit it does seem to be good value. You will need to add more memory for printing complex documents, but print speeds and overall quality are up with the best, making it a good choice as a departmental workhorse.
Contact GCC 020 8754 6000
See also:
All Inkjet Printers
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