Xerox Phaser 6125 review

Colour laser printers continue to drop in price and increase in speed and feature set. Even companies such as Xerox that are better known for their large business machines now include an inexpensive colour laser in their ranges.

The Phaser 6125 costs £136 and does its best to look smaller than it is. The majority of the case is white, with just a single dark-blue highlight at the front for its control panel. Its controls are fairly simple, with a diamond of menu buttons and three extras, which between them cover most functions.

The two-line by 16-character backlit LCD display is well used for both status and menu information, as well as an illuminated button at the right-hand end to wake up the machine manually from standby. It's not entirely clear what this button is for, as there's no walk-up print facility for use with a USB drive, but at least you can ensure the machine is ready to go before sending a document to it.

Although it seems short, a protrusion at the back hides the end of the 250-sheet paper tray and the machine is built vertically, with each drum and toner pair mounted one above the other inside the case, so it's quite tall. A single-sheet slot is fitted above the paper tray to accommodate envelopes and other special media.

The Phaser 6125 is provided with both USB and Ethernet connections, although Mac drivers weren't provided on the CD and had to be downloaded from the Xerox site. The printer uses its own page description language, rather than relying on PostScript.

Consumables are divided between the front and side of the printer. Open the cover on the right-hand side and you have easy access to the four toner cartridges, each of which slides into a separate holster that swings out to accommodate it. The individual drums are all easy to access at the front once you've pressed a button at the side and pulled down the front cover of the machine. The four cartridges are fitted in a frame, held in place by four turnkeys.

Xerox rates the Phaser 6125 at 16 pages per minute (ppm) for mono pages and 12ppm for colour. We didn't see anything approaching this under test. In fact, printing our 10-page black text document took two minutes one second, which is an overall speed of just 4.96ppm. We printed this document as a straight Word file of 10 text pages, using default printer settings, so there was nothing unusual in the setup. The reason the printer took so long to complete the job is that it spent more than a minute processing and transferring the data before the print engine started up. It appears to take a long time to rasterise each page.

This idea is supported by the fact that a five-page copy of a text and colour graphics page took just 43 seconds to complete, which equates to 6.98ppm. While this is still some way off the 12ppm in the brochure, it's noticeably faster than the black text print. Finally, a 15cm x 10cm photo was completed in a reasonable 29 seconds.

Text quality, as from most mono and colour lasers, was very good. The printer's default resolution of 600dpi was enough to produce clean curves and diagonals. Colour graphics were bright and smooth, with no distracting dither patterns, although we did notice some misregistration of black text over colour, with noticeable haloing making the characters look snow topped.

Our test photo image, while showing reasonable colour fidelity, came through too dark, losing nearly all shadow detail and with hints of banding across smooth areas of sky.

Toner cartridges are rated at 2000 pages for black and 1000 pages for each of the colours. Xerox doesn't quote the drum units as consumables, so we haven't included them in calculating page costs, but even working with toner prices alone gives print costs of 2.39p for a black page and 13.91p for colour. Neither of these is low and the colour cost in particular offsets the low purchase price of the printer itself.