Xerox Phaser 6120N review

The Phaser 6120N is Xerox's new entry-level colour laser printer.

It's a four-pass printer, which means that it lays four separate images on the page, one on top of the other - one yellow, one red (magenta), one blue (cyan) and one black. Together, these four separate layers make up the finished, full-colour, print.

The downside of using four-pass technology is that as well as being slow, it puts greater wear and tear on the print engine. In a single-pass printer, we'd expect the drum to last for four times as many mono pages as colour. But according to the specs, you'll need to replace the 6120N's drum after 10,000 colour and just 20,000 mono pages.

Each colour page you print will cost around 7.7p, and each black page just over 1.7p. These running costs are neither exceptionally good nor bad - the Konica Minolta 2400W and the Epson C1100 in our guides both cost roughly the same per page.

Initially, the 6120N handled text pages as if they were colour - putting them through the print engine four times. We had to manually switch the driver to print in black only - it should be able to switch from colour to mono mode without any help from the user. Its mono print speed was good, at 19 pages per minute (ppm), but at 2.4ppm, its performance in our mixed-colour test was underwhelming. Using the PostScript driver produced slightly slower results in every test.

Mono print tests were good, but the colour prints lacked vibrancy and the PowerPoint slides in our mixed-colour test were printed with a dark band on the right-hand side.

The Xerox Phaser 6120N is a good quality budget laser with the added bonus that because it has its own Ethernet port, you can plug it straight into your router, allowing all the PCs on your network to use it. Some of its rivals, however, are cheaper to run and produce better colour prints.