Serious colour for the smaller business: New entry-level MFP makes A3 colour more accessible as Sharp conquers key price - performance threshold

The new 18 pages-per-minute (ppm) MX-1810U is an ideal introduction to office colour. The standard model, which has the quality, speed and essential productivity features needed by most workgroups most of the time, is priced to appeal to budget-conscious businesses that are keen to embrace colour.

“This is a significant milestone on the journey to colour MFPs becoming standard office equipment,” said Yosuke Kashu, Market and Product Information Manager, Sharp Digital Document Systems Europe. ”We’ve conquered a major price: performance threshold to bring them within reach of every business. You can increase its capabilities still further by adding extra-value options, too.”

Given the target market - customers who may be new to colour MFPs - the design brief for the MX-1810U put a special emphasis on ease of use, without sacrificing performance or versatility. Sharp’s engineers were also keen to meet an increasing demand for office equipment with superior energy efficiency and low running costs.

Versatile, yet easy to use

Although affordably priced, the MX-1810U is versatile, highly configurable and extremely simple to use. Every major function is intuitive to operate and a colour touch screen with its own stylus pen simplifies operation still further.

Advanced administration utilities such as Sharp Remote Access Control and Sharp Remote Device Manager – originally developed for the manufacturer’s high performance office machines - keep everything running smoothly, and even the paper drawers have ‘easy-grip’ handles for extra comfort.

Although equipped with all major MFP functions as standard, the MX-1810U can be upgraded with a wide range of extras to improve its copying, scanning and document filing capabilities, as well as a larger paper supply for longer uninterrupted operation.

It can also be equipped to run the latest Sharp OSA ®(Open Systems Architecture) applications, which are used to automate time-consuming routine office tasks.

21st century energy efficiency

At a time when energy conservation is more important than ever, the Energy Star-certified MX-1810U is reassuringly economic to run. Its scanner uses energy-efficient LED lights, the warm-up time is only 45 seconds and, overall, the MFP has a Total Electricity Consumption (TEC value) of just 2.24 kWh.

In addition, it has an intelligent power shut-off feature which ‘learns’ the workgroup’s work habits - saving power by ‘sleeping’ during quiet times - as well as  a facility to set automatic power-up and power-down times.