Epson Aculaser C3800 is marketed by the manufacturer as an affordable and simple to operate printer for small office. This color printer is promised to deliver the quality of printing close to photographic. It’s rather speedy device: produces up to 20 color ppm, thanks to the one-pass printing mechanism. So, this is the right model for an office in need of color printing.

The device is pretty big, mainly in height, and weighs just over 30 kg (with all toner cartridges and other fillings). Cartridges are positioned vertically along the front panel enabling speedy one-pass color printing. At the bottom is the main paper tray for 500 sheets.

There is a multipurpose tray to open which you must take off almost the complete front pane. The tray occupies a lot of room, however it’s not intended to be used often, but for printing a page or two from time to time. There’s a USB socket for memory sticks to the right of the multipurpose tray.

Aculaser C3800 allows you to safely print sensitive document by taking advantage of the USB socket. This is a lot more convenient – no more entering passwords first on your PC, then on the control panel of the printer.

On that very right panel you can find the power button and interface ports. USB and Ethernet ports are located in rather deep cavity where you can reach if you open a small door.

The output tray is capable of accepting 250 sheets. Just in case, you can set the plastic fence to catch flying pages, however during tests that never happened. Even when the printing rate is high, the copies are spit out chaotically, but neatly collected into output tray.

Control Panel is not something extraordinary: it has a small LCD screen, the 4 navigation buttons and the cancel button located in a visible place.

To get to the cartridges, you need to open the entire front panel of the printer, together with the control panel. Cartridges are arranged vertically; removing and installing them is very easily, just pull the little handlers of the same color, which is located on the toner cartridge.

Driver of the Epson Aculaser C3800 is very much similar to that of inkjet printers, and from them it adapted the “Photo” tab in the simplified menu.

First tab of the drivers allows adjusting the paper source, paper size and printing quality. Clicking the “Advanced” button on the same page will bring a tab with color management and printing resolution. On that tab you can select printing modes (color and monochrome), setup different color management preset. Also, you may manually specify color, contrast, saturation and brightness.

Single-pass mechanism of the Epson C3800 allows printing black-and-white and color documents at nearly the same rate: 20 pages per minute, 25 ppm for monochrome pages. Printing documents with graphics and text at 1200 dpi resolution took about 10 times longer than at 300 dpi without getting any outstanding difference in quality. So, don’t waste your time on that, unless you are printing photos.

So, the quality of printing is OK even at the 300 dpi resolution. The text is readable even at 4 pt font mass. Not to mention the 1200 dpi resolution, when the outlines of font characters are a lot more accurate, and 4 pt fonts are legible, too.

Finding a fault in color reproduction of the Aculaser C3800 is futile. The colors are vivid and lively, without gaps. Photo printing is excellent: no unnecessary shades, only black-and-white images have light blue tint. The printer produces detail well, without obvious raster.

Epson Aculaser C3800 operates silently, has capacious toner cartridges, and menus and driver have a user-friendly interface. The rate of printing is not the fastest, but enough for most needs. Outstanding color reproduction with Epson toners is recommended for printing of presentations and brochures.