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- High-quality, fast print output
- Comprehensive connectivity options
- Supremely versatile
- Big and heavy
- High print costs
- 2.4GHz Wi-Fi only
The Xerox C235 MFP is a laser printer, the type of printer that has become increasingly rare in the home office printer scene of late. That’s mainly because ink tank inkjet printers have become more practical: able to print large volumes of printouts and at a lower cost per page – areas laser printers used to dominate.
But there’s still an argument for keeping laser printers like this Xerox as an option. They can be more reliable than inkjets in the long run, not having nozzles to get clogged or ink to dry out. And since laser printers print out a page all at once a time, they also tend to be faster for a given price.
The Xerox C235 ticks most of the boxes a good multifunction device needs, producing prints, copies and scans reliably, quickly and without fuss, while delivering most of the features a home or small business printer needs. The only catch is that print costs are higher than the equivalent ink tank machine.
Xerox C235 review: What do you get for the money?
The Xerox C235 is available for around £260 if you want the model with the automatic document feeder (ADF) on top, or £220 if you want the identical model without the ADF – if you only need to make the occasional single-page copy or scan, for example.
There’s no arguing with the physical amount of printer that Xerox gives you for your money. At just a little shy of 20kg it’s not an easy thing to lug around, and at 411 x 394 x 344mm, it’s a big and heavy device for any domestic setting. This isn’t something you can just slide onto a bookshelf and forget about.
Like most printers, the C235 is a grey plastic affair, but it feels well-made and the myriad doors and panels open and close with a reassuring feeling of solidity, which bodes well for long-term survivability. I was particularly impressed with the solidity of the hinge on the ADF and its support leg. When running big print jobs, I tended to leave the ADF up and out of the way, so I was happy it was well supported.
When it comes to paper handling, there is a 250-sheet cassette hidden in the base with a single-page bypass slot so you can slide in an envelope or a sheet of letterhead paper. The ADF that sits up top can be loaded with up to 50 pages for copying, so once loaded, you can just press copy and let it get on with things unattended.
The C235 also supports automatic duplex printing, which means that, as well as printing double-sided, you can load the ADF with single-sided pages and then output them as a double-sided document. The C235 can’t automatically copy double-sided pages, but that’s a feature generally only found on larger, more expensive, fully-fledged office printers.
And, as for input sources, the C235 is the very definition of agnostic. It works with Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chromebook machines without fuss. There’s a mobile app for Android and iOS, and the C235 is Mopria and AirPrint certified. It has a built-in email client so you can email scans directly from it. There’s a USB-A port so you can print from, or scan to, a thumb drive, while connectivity extends to Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct and wired networking. One word of warning, though, the C235 only works over a 2.4GHz network.
There’s even a pair of RJ11 connectors at the back to connect to a phone line if you want to take advantage of the printer’s fax facility. My one criticism on the bang-for-your-buck front is that the C235 comes boxed with reduced-capacity 500-page toner cartridges rather than the standard 1,500-page units available at retail.
How easy is it to set up?
Before you start unboxing the C235, it’s worth reading the instruction manual, because there are quite a few strips of tape and red plastic clip-tags that need to be removed, and some of them — the plastic transit straps that secure the four toner cartridges in place are the principle offenders — aren’t all that obvious. Also worth highlighting is that, if you want to connect the C235 via USB, you’ll need to buy your own USB-B to USB-A cable as none is provided in the box.
Once you’ve unboxed the C235 and plugged it in, however, setting it up is headache free. Xerox suggests you start by downloading its Easy Assistant mobile app and using that to configure any necessary wireless settings, but you can do this via the printer’s touchscreen if you don’t have your phone to hand. There is also a Xerox Windows app in the Microsoft Store, which lets you check the printer status, manage print queues and order supplies from Xerox.
Connecting the C235 to my Chromebook was as simple as could be, and it worked perfectly via USB and Wi-Fi. I had to install sane-airscan on my Ubuntu box to get the scanner to work, but that’s hardly an uncommon issue.
In everyday use, it’s hard to exaggerate the boon the sharp 7.1in colour touchscreen is for using the C235. It allows you to access all the printers’ functions and settings without recourse to your PC or mobile device and it’s very easy to use
To the right of the screen, you’ll find a physical standby button and three touch-sensitive buttons for start, return and home. It’s a simple and intuitive layout, which is not something you can say about the control panels of some printers.
What about running costs?
Print costs can be the Achilles heel of laser printers, and the C235 is not immune to Paris’ arrows. Buy from Xerox and you’ll spend £61.20 for a standard black toner cartridge and £96.35 for each yellow, cyan and magenta cartridge, but it’s more cost effective to purchase them all in a single package for £278.99. With the both mono and colour cartridges delivering 1,500 pages that brings the price down to 4.6p per mono page and 13.9p per colour.
You can buy high capacity cartridges to save even more – these last 3,000 pages for mono and 2,500 pages for colour prints – but spending over £400 on a set of cartridges is a bit much to pay, no matter how much you save in price per page.
You can find the Xerox-brand toner cartridges cheaper if you look around, with one reseller selling the high-yield colour cartridges for £109, while third-party ink cartridges are cheaper again, but of course you pay your money and take your chance when it comes to actual ink capacity and print quality.
No matter which toner option you choose, the Xerox C235 will cost more to run than the more economical inkjet printers like the Epson EcoTank ET-2860, especially if you print a lot of colour. It doesn’t come with the option of an ADF, though.
What are the speed and print quality like?
For a sub-£300 printer, the C235 has an impressive turn of speed, spitting out pages of black and white text at the rate of 21 per minute and pages containing two colour 8 x 10in images at nearly three per minute or 23 seconds each.
That puts the C235 on a par with other similarly priced laser printers we’ve tested, like the Brother HL-L3210CW and Lexmark MC3426. Those speeds are typically higher than you’ll get from a similarly priced inkjet printer, and although some modern inkjets can print nearly as fast in monochrome, they mostly can’t keep up when it comes to colour output.
I have nothing bad to say about the quality of the C235’s output, despite the rather low 600 x 600dpi print resolution. Making direct comparisons between inkjet and laser printer resolutions is pretty pointless, as laser printers are not subject to the same level of ink diffusion, especially when printing on cheaper, more absorbent stock.
Text was every bit as dark and crisp as I’d expect from a good laser printer, but the quality of colour prints was better than the C235’s relatively low price tag would suggest.
In my testing, the C235 produced bold, saturated and accurate colours across a range of jobs from still photographs to graphic-heavy PDFs to some high-quality scans of works by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. The roses in The Roses of Heliogabalus looked suitably luxuriant and vibrant when printed onto some quality A4 glossy stock.
This C235’s scanner is limited to 600dpi, but I think that’s more than adequate for the home and office jobs it’s intended for. Scans were crisp, clear and fast: capturing an A4 document at 150dpi took just over seven seconds, while doubling the pixel density only added another two seconds. To scan a 6 x 4in photo at 600dpi took 16 seconds.
The C235 is also generally a quiet printer, going about its business with noticeably less audio intrusion than any of the inkjet printers I have tested recently.
Should you buy the Xerox C235?
Versatility and quality are the two chief selling points of the Xerox C235. Once you’ve lived with a printer with an automatic document feeder, automatic duplex printing, and support for every connectivity option and operating system under the sun, you will never want to go back to a printer without them. Combine that level of across-the-board versatility with impressive print speed and quality and a low asking price, and you’ve a winning package.
Looking at the glass as half-empty rather than full, I have to say that the wireless radio really should support the 5GHz band, it weighs a ton, and if you print a lot of colour images, you are going to feel the high print costs where it hurts, but for just over £250, I think those are crosses that can be borne without complaint.
