Xerox Phaser 6280N review

Xerox's Phaser 6280N is a single-pass workgroup colour laser printer.

It has native PostScript 3 support, a maximum monthly duty cycle of 70,000 pages and a standard paper capacity of 250 sheets in the main tray and 150 sheets of up to 220gsm paper in the special media tray. It also has Ethernet and USB connections. The default PostScript driver took only a few seconds to install.

You can configure the printer using its built-in menu system, but we prefer a web interface to fiddling around with menu buttons and a tiny LCD display. Unfortunately, not all the options are replicated in the web interface - including such basic features as the length of time before the printer switches into power-saving mode. There are, however, some great security features, such as the ability to restrict access to the Phaser by IP address.

The 6280N has a blistering mono print speed of 25.9ppm and flawless text quality. Colour document prints were slower at 8.8ppm, which is slightly slower than many of the printers in our last colour laser group test (Labs, Shopper 250), but the quality didn't disappoint. Business documents, graphs and illustrations were vibrant and eye-catching, with excellent shading. Red tones were slightly stronger than in our original images, but this actually helped many documents make more of an impression. Even our photo- printing tests produced good results with fine detail.

A range of upgrade options is available for the Phaser 6280 series. These include an automatic duplexer, extra memory, an additional 550-sheet paper tray and a 40GB hard disk. The hard disk can be used to install additional fonts, buffer large printer jobs, and store logs and data about the printer. However, these add-ons are often less economical than buying a printer that comes with these features as standard.

The 6280N uses a minimum of consumables, with toner and OPC drums combined into single units for each colour. High-yield cartridges produced print costs of 9.1p per mixed colour page. Most of this comes from the 7.4p colour costs, while a mono page costs a fairly average 1.7p. This isn't too bad, particularly when you consider that toner prices have increased slightly since our last colour laser group test. The total cost of ownership is low, at £2,284 for three years' heavy use (72,000 mono and 36,000 colour pages), and a reasonable £350 for three years' light use (2,400 mono and 1,200 colour).

This excellent business printer can produce great-looking mono text, colour documents and business graphics. However, it can't quite rival the low costs and fast colour print speeds of Epson's Aculaser C2800N.

Author: Kat Orphanides