Xerox Phaser 6200DP review

Anyone who buys colour printers for workgroups will understand that the affordability of colour lasers is more important than the networkability of inkjets.

If the battle for colour laser supremacy began in earnest at the turn of the century, the Xerox Phaser 6200DP demonstrates that the war is far from over.

In common with other colour laser printers, this device is very large for an A4 device, principally to accommodate the four toners and printheads it requires. However, it's a smart and stylish-looking printer, built to last. You can load up to 500 sheets into a drawer at the front which slots in flush with the main unit, and there's a paper level indicator just to the right. Printouts appear on top of the machine in a large integral catch tray.

Being a network printer, you can expand the input with an optional 1000-sheet high-capacity tray, which fits underneath in cabinet fashion. A multipurpose tray hinges open at the front to hold an extra 100 sheets of plain paper, typically used for letterheads, and it looks substantial enough for heavy use.

The output catch tray is a thick sheet of translucent plastic that lifts off to reveal the four toner cartridges underneath. These are arranged in a row, printing full-colour sheets in one pass rather than four, similar to a carousel arrangement. Replacing the cartridges is straightforward, and should be reasonably unchallenging for most office workers: they just slot down and lock in place. The translucent cover doesn't make the machine any prettier, but at least no one is going to be left wondering where the toner cartridges are supposed to go.

The seven-line LCD window on the top gives immediate assistance and you can easily navigate the options using the buttons. This system is used on other Xerox Phaser printers, and is really quite excellent in its simplicity and high quality of online help.

The DP model of the Phaser 6200 provides ports for USB, 10/100BaseT Ethernet and parallel connections. The Ethernet choice allows you to add the machine to a TCP/IP network in seconds, either by manually entering the IP addresses or by leaving the job to a DHCP server. If you want to print using USB, Xerox still provides the necessary serial driver, but it won't support networking. Port switching is completely automatic, as is switching between genuine Adobe PostScript 3 and PCL 6 as your workgroup users require.

Worldly wise

Print speed is good but doesn't come close to dedicated monochrome lasers. Although quoted at 16 pages per minute (ppm), our tests suggest a real-world performance of around 10ppm. The advantage of the single-pass system is that this means 10ppm in colour too. We were surprised at the good performance of the built-in duplexer, which we'd normally expect to slow down speed significantly. In the event, the time difference between printing 20 single-side sheets and 10 double-sided sheets was merely a handful of seconds.

Output quality is above average for a colour laser, although it could be better considering its 2400dpi x 600dpi potential. The machine handled PostScript jobs from QuarkXPress and Acrobat with aplomb. It's an excellent text printer and has no problem handling tiny font sizes; even 3pt text output was perfectly readable with no break-up whatsoever. Photo images suffer from a consistent dithered grain, while presentation graphics look clean and punchy.

You can access and configure the Phaser 6200DP remotely using any Web browser. Comprehensive reports will help you with job accounting to see who is using the machine and how. It also comes with troubleshooting and diagnostic functions. Xerox has done a fantastic job on this feature, and we feel confident that system managers will adore it, not least for the automated email alerts for low-toner warnings and paper jams.