Xerox Phaser 6125N review

This compact colour laser has both USB and Ethernet ports, to connect directly to your PC or a network router, and it's strikingly cheap. So what do you get for your £157?

The 6125N is easy to use, with maintenance and admin tools accessible from both the LCD panel and over your network. Cartridges came installed; the setup guide was clear, and the installer was easy to use, but it couldn't detect the printer on our network, so we had to get its IP address from a status print to finish the process.

Print quality was generally excellent, with sharp text and clear, bright, glossy images. Some dark shades came out black, and we noticed a slight red tint on pale areas of photos, but these were minor flaws. As well as a 250 sheet paper tray, there's a slot for media such as envelopes. Envelope printing was a bit of a hassle, but the results were accurate, with minimal creasing.

Black and white printing was slow. We had to wait just over a minute for 10 pages of text, which is very slow compared to most lasers. Colour speeds were better than expected, though, with 10 pages of our complex mixed colour document printing in a minute and a half. Using Photo mode, our six 6x4 inch photos printed in a similar time.

Unfortunately, despite its low price and high print quality, the Phaser 6125N is hard to recommend due to its running costs. A single mono page works out at 1.86p, which is on the high side, and colour costs are among the most expensive we've ever seen, at 9.06p, for a total cost of almost 11p per page of mixed colour and black content. And the drum, rated at 30,000 pages, isn't replaceable. Yes, you read that right: the whole printer is only designed to last 30,000 pages. Surely that's putting the 'mental' in 'environmental'?

Despite the price, it's only worth considering the 6125N if you need a network colour laser but won't print many pages.