printer and another guide

Xerox Phaser 7400

Continuing the trend of producing good quality laser printers, Xerox released the Phaser 7400. It is a large format color laser printer that has been designed for busy offices or businesses that need fast, high quality copying.

The large format option allows it to print at up to 12 x 18 paper, which is a standard format for artists and graphic designers. Not many other lasers can support paper of that size, certainly not at this price point anyway.

There is a small control panel on the front with one of the clearest and most informative LCD screens on the market. The menu is very intuitive and it’s obvious that a lot of thought went in to designing it. Each menu function is a maximum of three button presses away, and there is also a back button, which saves a lot of time when you choose the wrong function.

Performance-wise the 7400 is pretty good. Print speed is around 35 pages per minute for a typical business document, and color around 32 pages per minute. This isn’t far off the Xerox promotional material, of 36 pages per minute for color, and 40 for black and white.

Print quality is good for both black and white, and color. Text and images are sharp, even down to fine details. There were examples of banding on grayscale images, and a little darkness for color, but overall the quality was good.

The 7400 is network ready, including a built-in Ethernet port. Connecting it to a network was as easy as plugging it in and switching it on. It appeared in our workgroup a couple of minutes later. The included driver package is good, easy to use and worked first time. There were also useful programs in there to add features to it.

The standard paper drawer holds 800 sheets. As this is a large format printer they natively support the larger 12 x 18 in the drawer. This makes a nice change as normally, to print at that size we have to use the manual feeder. Paper capacity can be enlarged to 3000 sheets with additional drawers.

It also includes a hard drive for storing and scheduling large print jobs, a finisher for stapling, hole punching etc, PostScript support, and optional duplex printing to allow for a fully functioning almost commercial printing environment.

Toner is relatively inexpensive, with high yield versions being able to produce around 15000 sheets before needing replacement. Color ones cost more, but also produce more, with an average lifespan of 18000 pages.

This is a good printer for business or those who want to provide commercial printing services on a budget. The Xerox Phaser 7400 puts the company in the fight for a share of the lucrative laser printer market.