Xerox Phaser 6125 review

Xerox's Phaser 6125 is an inexpensive colour laser that's an obvious choice for small and home offices wanting to print colour documents quickly.

It's also compact, measuring just 389x400x394mm, which is helpful if you have limited space. It has Ethernet and USB ports, so you can connect to it to a network or directly to a computer. The network administration interface and the menus displayed on the printer's mono LCD screen are easy to use. It was easy to set up, but the installer failed to auto-detect it over our network, so we had to enter its IP address manually.

Print quality is reasonably good, but unremarkable. It's adequate for most tasks, with no major flaws in our text, mixed colour, or photo quality tests. Text looked sharp and black, and colour images were clean. We noticed a slight red tint on shaded greyscale images printed in mixed-colour mode. This was a minor problem and printing in true greyscale eliminated it. The same red tinge was visible in pale areas of our high-quality photo prints. Envelopes printed without being creased in the process.

The 6125 managed just 9.1ppm in our mono text print speed test, slower than any printer in our recent colour laser printer Labs. It was surprisingly quick for its price in our colour speed test, printing 24 mixed colour pages at 6.6ppm. This is thanks to its single-pass engine, although 6.6ppm is slow compared with other single-pass lasers. If you're just printing a single page of text, you'll have to wait 20 seconds for it to appear.

The Phaser 6125's greatest problem is its high print costs. A single page of mixed colour and black costs 10.9p: 1.9p for the mono elements and 9p per page for colour. Long-term running costs are also high. The drum lasts for just 30,000 pages, and can't be replaced. The high cost of toner soon mounts up if you do a lot of printing. There's enough toner to print 500 black and colour pages out of the box; replacement toner cartridges are available only in 2,000- and 1,000-page capacities for black and colour respectively.

Although its colour print costs were slightly higher, we prefer TallyGenicom's 8108N. It costs over £20 less, has much faster mono print speeds and lower overall running costs. However, Xerox's Phaser 6125 is cheap to buy and could be worth the small premium if you want slightly faster colour speeds but don't print many pages. Its limited lifespan is unlikely to affect most home users, and it doesn't take up much space. If you do a lot of printing, you'll save money by buying a more expensive laser, such as HP's LaserJet 3600.