Xerox Phaser 8200DP review

Solid-ink printing has experienced several ups and downs in the popularity stakes over the years.

This unique Tektronix technology now makes yet another appearance in the Xerox Phaser 8200DP. But regardless of its printing system, this A4 colour device could teach conventional network office printers a thing or two.

The Phaser 8200DP is inevitably large compared with monochrome devices, occupying a footprint of 423mm x 600mm and rising 390mm high. Paper is fed from a front-loading cassette, which fits flush under the unit, with printouts delivered on top of the unit. The way the output tray mechanism is built, you have to reach over it to retrieve your printouts, which won't suit every tabletop installation. A small multipurpose tray flips open at the front too.

Status symbol

Although you would normally manage the printer from your Mac, you can configure jobs and obtain feedback using easy-to-navigate menus in a LCD window on top near the front. There's even a helpful 'i' button which reveals information on current job status, explains the menus themselves and offers usage and troubleshooting tips.

By lifting off the output tray, you reveal the solid-ink loading system underneath. This is easy to load, and is just a matter of slotting specially shaped waxy blocks into correspondingly shaped holes. There are no carousels, no plastic cartridges, no tapes to tear off and absolutely no mess.

Our only concern with solid-ink systems is that your printouts are somewhat waxy in texture, and there are clearly limits when it comes to dot resolution compared with ink droplets and laser toner. As a result, photo images tend to appear rather grainy on plain paper, and the printer has problems with tiny font sizes and fine line art.

For business graphics (including overhead projector transparency slides), it's outstanding with bright, punchy solids, very pure blacks and surprisingly smooth gradients. You can even write directly on to the printouts with a ballpoint pen.

The machine supports USB, Ethernet and fast parallel connections. Setting it up as a TCP/IP network printer for shared PC and Mac use was a no-brainer, and its support for DHCP servers can make it completely automatic too. Xerox provides full Mac OS X and Classic drivers on the CD, along with decent instructions on how to configure the latter properly.

Like most network printers these days, you can configure all properties of the Phaser 8200DP remotely using any Web browser. Xerox implements this feature beautifully, from comprehensive job and consumables accounting and user profiling to diagnostics and troubleshooting logs.

In use, the device wasn't as fast as we expected. Obviously, no printer is ever as fast as its quoted pages-per-minute (ppm) speed, but our basic black text pages were churning through at around 10ppm rather than the quoted 16ppm. Printing full colour was barely any slower, except of course for the initial processing time.

Generously, the Phaser 8200DP incorporates a built-in duplexer; printing on both sides of each sheet adds around 20-25% to the total output time. Its genuine Adobe PostScript 3 performance was very good and colour-accurate.

One of our tests was a complex QuarkXPress spread, which we know can take up to 15 minutes to output to other colour printers, but the Phaser 8200DP completed the job perfectly in under three.

Memory gaps

One hangover from the Tektronix days appears to be the approach to memory upgrades. Although the 128Mb of RAM already supplied in the unit is sufficient for most buyers, a further 128Mb will cost you over £200. Further reservations we have with the machine are that it can be noisy, and, if this isn't enough to make you want to locate the unit away from users, the fan exhaust smell probably will.