Xerox Phaser 6600DN review

Xerox’s Phaser 6600DN is on the large side for a home office printer, but the effect is softened by a sloping top panel and a swoop where the white and blue plastics meet. Its specifications are very businesslike; in the base there’s a cassette which can hold a full ream of paper, while above is a 150-sheet multipurpose feed. Duplex (double-sided) printing is standard, with pages coming to rest in a big 250-sheet output tray. If you’re planning on doing a lot of printing, you can fit a further 550-sheet cassette for a total input of 1,250 pages. The standard Gigabit Ethernet port will provide all the bandwidth you need, even at the printer’s rated 35 pages per minute (ppm) in black or colour.

Once you’ve finished setting up the printer, it will print out its detailed status over three sides, using two sheets of paper. That could be a help when you’re first setting it up, but it’s annoying if you’ve just turned it back on after the weekend; every time we switched it on it would print out the same two status sheets. It’s also slightly at odds with the driver’s Earth Smart Settings, which tell you how much planet you’ve saved through options such as duplex, draft and multi-page printing.

^ The default tab of the print driver is a bit too simple, so you might need this advanced tab quite often

^ Earth Smart shows you how much planet various features will help you save – duplex printing is a real help here

Our tests got off to an impressive start. Using the recommended PostScript driver, the printer delivered 25 text pages at a blistering 26.8ppm. However, it seemed daunted by our complex graphics test, which ran at only about one third of the speed of the mono test. We weren’t happy with the dull colours in the result, either, but switching to the PCL driver upped the speed to 10.8ppm, and unleashed superb print quality: colours were strong and accurate, graduations and colour borders were precise, and prints had an even sheen. Magnification showed that text wasn’t the sharpest we’ve seen but it looked perfect to the naked eye.

This printer’s menu system is straightforward enough, but it’s one of many to use a power-saving button, illuminated when the printer enters sleep mode. We’re not sure why only this button can wake the sleeping printer, as opposed to any of the others. It’s also a shame that there’s no USB host port for printing from USB drives, but even more disappointing is the comparative lack of support for mobile devices: iOS users can connect with iPrint, but there’s no free Xerox app for the 80 per cent of people with an Android phone.

^ The web interface supports just about every option we can think of. Good job you can set an admin password

^ Xerox’s Android app requires a subscription to one of its mobile printing services. iOS users can use AirPrint, though

This printer takes up to eight consumables, although Xerox is keen to stress that the fuser and transfer units shouldn’t typically need replacing. Calculated for toner alone, a mono page costs 1.3p, with a black and colour page weighing in at 8.3p. Including all consumables, as we usually do, these rise to 1.9p and 9.7p, which are on the high side – especially when compared to the Dell C3760dn, which is otherwise extremely similar and slightly better specified.