For anyone who has ever spent five minutes puzzling over a copier touch screen just to make a simple single-sided 8.5 x 11 copy, Toshiba feels your pain. The company’s newest multifunction units provide printing, color scanning, copying and faxing with an interface that Toshiba claims is completely intuitive and eliminates the need for any training.
The e-Studio 450s and its bigger sibling the 500s print and copy at 45 pages per minute and 50 pages per minute, respectively. Monochrome documents fired off from a computer are ready in just 8.5 seconds, and copies are done in 7.5. A USB drive on the front of the copier lets it pull PDFs off the drive to print instantly, or save scanned files directly onto the drive. The 500s gets a 40GB hard drive that gives it some additional functions, such as previewing color scans.
The unit’s flatbed scanner can handle flat pages as well as bound documents like books and reports, and both the 450S and 500s come with automatic document feeders that can handle 50 pages. On the output side of things, paper capacity can be adjusted from 600 sheets up to 4,100, depending on the configuration. Two choices of toner cartridge yield either 10,000 or 21,000 pages.
Both e-Studio copiers are available now through Toshiba’s dealer network. The 450s runs for $1,499 while the 500s weighs in at double that cost, at $2,999.