XEROX FaxCentre F116 review

As the name suggests, Xerox's FaxCentre F116 multifunction device is heavily orientated towards faxes.

It has four mono resolution modes up to 400x200dpi, will fax in colour at up to 300dpi and has 8MB of memory. This stores around 550 standard-resolution mono pages and can handle incoming faxes while the device is doing other jobs.

The FaxCentre connects to a PC via USB to provide mono laser printing and scanning. Xerox's Companion Suite Pro LM software handles configuration and status monitoring. ScanSoft OmniPage deals with optical character recognition (OCR), and PaperPort manages direct scan jobs.

Xerox quotes a print speed of 16ppm for the FaxCentre, but in our 50-page document test it managed only 10.5ppm. It came nearer the quoted figure when printing 50 copies of our test letter, achieving 14.4ppm. Our complex 24-page mixed colour test was much slower at just 4.8ppm.

Print quality was fine for text and acceptable for graphics and photos. Our greyscale tests showed bands of different shades, and darker regions of images tended to merge into black, losing detail.

We failed to print envelopes successfully. The driver's paper size option is hidden in its Advanced menu, but even with thick DL media selected the printer misaligned the address. Envelopes were left uncrumpled but unusable, and after each the status panel reported a paper jam that hadn't happened.

Scanning was simple, but even allowing for the low 300dpi optical resolution the quality could have been better. Light areas around dark objects, such as a white page of black text, had a blue cast, and outlines were soft. OmniPage took under 30 seconds to scan and recognise text in an A4 page, but the results were less accurate than we'd like.

Copy performance was very good. The text on standard-quality copies remained clearly legible and without distortion for five generations. A single A4 copy took 15 seconds, and duplicating a 10-page document took just one minute five seconds.

The FaxCentre excels as a standalone fax and copying device, but it's less convincing as a multifunction device. Given its high price and running costs of over 2p per page, many will opt for cheaper inkjet-based devices.