The Pantum M6702DW all-in-one printer has a lot in common with the single-function Pantum P3012DW we reviewed a few months ago. It hails from the same emerging Chinese company that has been offering printers since 2010 and that has built a strong presence in the market for budget monochrome lasers. The M6702DW delivered nearly identical performance in our tests while adding scan and copy features (but not faxing). Pantum’s printers don’t have official list prices, but the M6702DW is a thrifty $179.99 on Amazon at this writing ($40 more than the print-only P3012DW), making it worth a look from home or micro office workers with micro budgets.
Easy Setup, With a Choice of Connections
As with most mono laser printers, physical setup for the Pantum M6702DW is straightforward. Like its sibling, it keeps running costs down by using separate drum and toner components. Both are shipped inside the printer, in the same tray that normally holds them. To get started, you remove the tray from the printer; take out the toner cartridge and pull out the plastic tab that keeps toner from spilling during shipping; pull a protective sheet off the drum; snap the toner cartridge back into place; and replace the tray in the printer.
Weighing 28.3 pounds and measuring 13.8 by 16.3 by 14.4 inches (HWD), the M6702DW is small enough to put on your desk, but its ample connection options—including Ethernet, USB, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct, along with NFC support for mobile devices—let you put it elsewhere in your office. The tiltable control panel is to the left of the flatbed scanner, which is mounted over the printer output tray. A two-line LCD and control buttons let you move through the menus, as well as give copy and scan commands.
When it comes to printing, the Pantum’s paper handling is more than sufficient for most home offices or for a personal printer in any size office. The lone paper drawer can hold 250 sheets of letter- or legal-size paper, and is supplemented by a single-page multipurpose tray for feeding an occasional piece of special-purpose media. The printer also offers automatic duplexing for printing two-sided documents. For scanning, by contrast, paper handling is limited to manually loading one sheet at a time on the 8.7-by-11.7-inch flatbed. With no automatic document feeder, it’s suitable for light-duty scanning only.
Pantum’s recommended monthly duty cycle for the printer is 750 to 3,500 pages. But as a practical matter, if you regularly print more than about 1,000 pages a month (an average 50 pages per business day), refilling a 250-sheet tray can quickly become an unwelcome chore.
Remember, too, that the more you expect to print, the more attention you should pay to running costs. The M6702DW’s cost per page, using its high-capacity toner cartridge, is 2.8 cents. Compare that to 0.6 cent for the HP Neverstop Laser MFP 1202w, which is a key reason why the HP is our Editors’ Choice award winner for entry-level monochrome laser AIOs even given its $329.99 list price. Which of the two will cost you less in the long run depends on how many pages you print. (For more on printer operating costs, see our guide to saving money on your next printer. The article emphasizes comparing costs for inkjets, but the same approach works for mono lasers and is easier to calculate since they have only one toner color.)
For our print speed and output quality tests, I connected the M6702DW to our Windows 10 Pro testbed over an Ethernet network. Driver installation was unusually easy—the one-click setup routine simply asks you to specify a USB, Wi-Fi, or wired network connection, then installs without you having to do anything else.
Good Speed, Good Text Quality
In our performance tests, the Pantum M6702DW was in the top tier of low-cost mono lasers across the board. Rated at 32 pages per minute, it actually delivered 33ppm when printing pages 2 through 12 of Microsoft Word text document. For the entire file, including the slower first page, it tied with the single-function P3012DW at 24.8ppm, negligibly faster than the $249 Canon imageClass MF267dw and $199.99 Brother MFC-L2717DWC (24ppm each). All four were a bit quicker than the $179.99 HP LaserJet MFP M234dwe at 20.8ppm, and far faster than the HP Neverstop MFP 1202w (16.9ppm).
On our full suite of business documents—the Word file plus a variety of PDF, Excel, and PowerPoint pages—the M6702DW managed 17ppm, taking just a few seconds longer than the Canon MF267dw and Pantum P3012DW. The other printers mentioned above were considerably slower at 12.6ppm to 14.2ppm. It printed our 4-by-6-inch test photos in an average of 9 seconds apiece.
Print output quality proved good for text but less appealing for graphics and photos. Text offered crisp, clean edges and was easily readable at sizes as small as 5 points for all of the fonts we test that would likely be seen in business documents; some were readable at 4 points. One of two highly stylized fonts with heavy strokes was legible at 8 points; the other, harder to render well, tended to fill in white space between and within characters, making anything smaller than 10 points hard to read.
As for photos and graphics, they were generally good enough to clearly convey an image, but not suitable for a report going to an important client or a brochure aimed at potential customers. Graphics lost or broke up thin lines, photos showed posterization, and both showed banding, uneven pile height in solid dark areas, and easily visible dithering patterns.
We don’t usually dwell on scanning and copying quality for AIOs meant for office use, because copy quality depends on both print quality, which we cover elsewhere, and scan quality, which is similar for most business all-in-ones. However, the M6702DW’s scans and copies were enough below par to demand mention.
Copied text came out well enough, despite being a little grayer than the originals, but graphics and photos were significantly degraded. Photos in particular showed much more loss of shadow detail than is typical, along with impossible-to-miss artifacts. The problems were fully due to the scanner, as was obvious from looking at another AIO’s scans of the same originals. If you just need to copy and scan text documents, or can live with low-quality copies and scans of graphics and photos, the Pantum may satisfy. But don’t expect good scans or copies.
Solid Enough…If You Don’t Scan Much
The Pantum M6720DW’s poor copying and scanning limit its appeal to a relatively narrow niche. If you don’t need scan and copy capability at all, the single-function Pantum P3012DW is a better bet. Or, if you want decent scan and copy features with an automatic document feeder (ADF) for handling multipage documents, the Canon MF267dw or Brother MFC-L2717DWC do it better and also provide faxing.
The HP LaserJet MFP M234dwe and Neverstop MFP 1202w don’t include ADFs, though they do offer faxing and, depending on how many pages you print, their low running costs could win you over. Even with all these competitors, however, if you want an AIO small enough to share a desk with and need only minimal scan and copy functionality, the Pantum M6702DW could be a good choice.
