Editors' Rating
| Output quality |  |
6.0 |
| Service & support |  |
7.0 |
| Paper handling | |
7.0 |
| Features | |
7.0 |
| Value |  |
8.0 |
| Setup & ease of use | |
8.0 |
| Performance | |
8.0 |
Published: 20 May 2002
Xerox's new Phaser 6200DP breaks the speed barrier for colour lasers, printing all four colours in one pass instead of the usual four. Add to this its useful features for a busy office, from built-in Ethernet to Web-based management tools, and the Phaser 6200DP would seem like the ideal text/graphics workhorse. But we've seen other printers sacrifice quality in the name of speed, and the Phaser 6200DP struggled with the same issues.
Installing the Phaser 6200DP is surprisingly easy, assuming you have someone to help you lift this 36kg printer out of its box and into place. The cyan, magenta, yellow and black toner cartridges, as well as the imaging unit, load without a hitch. And it's simple to replace the other imaging components (such as the transfer roller and the fuser) via the printer's front panel. If the two-page installation poster isn't enough to get you started, a more detailed setup and quick-reference guide is provided. You'll also find the installer, the drivers, basic utilities (such as a font-download tool) and extensive electronic documentation on two CDs. One of the discs supplies advanced management tools such as CentreWare Web, which lets you manage the printer through an ordinary Web browser.
The Phaser 6200DP's £2,320 (ex. VAT) price is competitive for what you get. A 500-sheet paper tray and a 100-sheet multipurpose tray come standard; high-volume users might opt for the 1,000-sheet, high-capacity feeder (£690 ex. VAT). Standard connections include USB 1.1, parallel and Ethernet. The front-panel LCD is easy to navigate; one button brings up contextual help to explain each menu function or message. The printer supports automatic two-sided printing and comes with a generous 128MB of memory, which is expandable to 512MB.
The benefit of the Phaser 6200DP's single-pass design showed in our labs' tests. It delivered mixed text and graphics at 6.4ppm (pages per minute) and full-colour pages at 6.3ppm -- two to nearly three times as fast as its competitors respectively. With text, which all printers do in one pass, its speed averaged out at 10.5ppm.
Although it's an impressive performer, print quality could be disappointing. Both text and mixed text/graphics pages looked good overall, even though letters lacked sharpness and images appeared faint in spots. The real problems arose when printing photos and other complex colour images. Output appeared grainy, and while the colour matching seemed good, blacks appeared faded and splotchy. The Phaser 6200DP will do fine on everyday business documents with a few charts and graphs but nothing more complicated.
Xerox's standard support for the Phaser 6200DP is adequate, and extended service plans are available. The Xerox Web site includes updated drivers and management software, online user manuals, FAQs and a searchable knowledge base. The Phaser 6200DP has a lot going for it, including fast printing, versatile connectivity, broad OS support and an intuitive, menu-driven interface. However, the proof is in the printing, and the Phaser 6200DP falters at anything beyond basic business graphics. That may suit mainstream office users, but in-house publishing departments and graphics professionals will need a printer that can handle complex images better.
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