Xerox Phaser 6120 review

Xerox has long made laser printers for corporate customers, but the company is producing an increasing number of affordable products to tempt home and small business users.

The Phaser 6120 is Xerox's new entry-level model; at under £350, it is the cheapest colour laser it has yet produced.

Unlike the more expensive Phaser 8500 and 6300 ranges, the 6120 is a conventional laser printer that doesn't use Xerox's solid ink system. It's a four-pass device, so to print in colour it must create four separate colour page images. These are combined when the printer transfers them to the page, giving full-colour output.

This kind of printer is generally cheaper to produce than one with a single-pass engine, but there are a couple of downsides. A four-pass engine usually takes four times as long to print in colour, and uses certain components such as the imaging drum four times for every page, shortening its life.

In a four-pass colour laser, we'd expect the drum to last for four times as many mono pages as colour ones, but Xerox's figures say you'll need a replacement after 20,000 mono pages or 10,000 colour. After its original drum and 1,500-page toners are exhausted, each colour page should cost around 8.7p, and each black page just over 1.9p.

The 6120 is more expensive to run than most of the colour lasers in our last Labs round-up in Shopper November 2005. It looks very similar to the Konica Minolta Magicolor 2450 which featured in that test, and it produced almost identical times and results in our print tests.

When using the PCL driver, the Phaser 6120 printed our mono text documents in colour with four passes, resulting in bluish-grey text. At 5.2ppm it was very slow. Forcing the driver into greyscale sped it up to 19ppm, but the driver should manage this automatically. At 2.4ppm, this printer's performance on our mixed-colour test was underwhelming. Using the PostScript driver produced slightly slower results in every test.

The 6120 produced good mono text, although its colour prints were a little lacking in vibrancy, and the blue PowerPoint slides in our mixed-colour test suffered from the same dark band we saw with Konica Minolta's Magicolor 2450.

This printer is competitively priced for a network-ready colour laser with PCL and PostScript languages, but we'd rather pay a little more for the Lexmark C522N.