Testing the Pantum M6552NW: It's Fast Enough
On our performance tests, in which both our PC testbed and the M6552NW were connected to the same network by Ethernet, the M6552NW matched or beat most of its competitors for the time it takes to print the first page. On the other hand, it was slower than any of the competition we compared it with from page 2 on, but not enough slower to matter for documents as long as 15 or 20 pages.
For our 12-page Word file, not including the first page, I clocked the M6552NW at 22.8ppm (29 seconds), just shy of its 23ppm rating, while the Brother MFC-L2717DW was fastest in this group at 36.7ppm (18 seconds). The big difference in ppm will matter for long documents, but for the 11 pages in this test, it's just 9 seconds. Adding the first page back in, the MFC-L2717DW, Canon MF267dw, and Pantum M6702DW were all essentially tied at 24ppm to 24.8ppm (29 to 30 seconds), while the M6552NW came in at 19.5ppm, or just 7 to 8 seconds slower.
On the business applications suite, which includes the Word text file along with documents that add graphics and color, the M6552NW and MFC-L2717DW tied for last place at 14.2ppm (1 minute and 46 seconds), the Pantum M6702DW came in second, at 17ppm (1:28), and the Canon MF267dw was first, at 18ppm (1:19). For individual documents, however, the range of differences from fastest printer to slowest in the group was as small as 3 seconds for some, and never more than 8 seconds.
Print quality is good for text and some graphics, potentially good enough for other graphics, and acceptable for a monochrome laser for photos. The text offered crisp, clean edges and was readable at sizes as small as 4 points for all of the fonts we test that would likely be used in business documents. Even when I looked at those fonts through a loupe, all were well-formed at 5 points, and only one showed breaks in characters at 4 points. One of the highly stylized fonts in our suite with heavy strokes was easily readable, but with loops slightly filled in, at 8 points. The more challenging one needed 10-point size for easy readability.
Graphics that printed with white backgrounds generally looked professional, even though a close look showed subtle banding in some fills in large areas. Graphics designed with edge-to-edge color tended to lack contrast, and also make the banding more obvious. On one image with a black background, a 2-pixel-wide line was barely visible (it rendered as some unconnected dashes), while a 1-pixel-wide line disappeared entirely. Photos showed subtle banding but were better than newspaper quality, making them more than acceptable for monochrome laser output.
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