printer and another guide

If you’re after a reasonably priced low use color laser printer, then the Xerox Phaser 6125 might be just what you need. Its relatively small footprint makes it ideal for space conscious users, or home workers.

The dimensions are small, but the printer is quite tall. The single-pass laser working over vertically mounted toner cartridges to save space. The paper tray is at the bottom, and can hold up to 250 sheets. It feeds the paper up and through the printer and deposits the on the top. While there is enough input space for a decent print job, there is no way that the output tray on the top could cope with the whole 250 sheets.

The standard is set high by this machine. Considering the low purchase price, built in networking and decent print quality, this little machine is going to be hard to beat. The control panel is basic to say the least, a simple two-line LCD screen and a couple of buttons. The menu us comprehensive and can provide access to just about all the features. If you don’t like it, the Xerox web interface can also control every aspect of the printer, while also giving information on fault codes and toner status.

Talking of toner, there is a starter cartridge included which is good for around 500 pages, replacements are good value, at around $29 for a 2000 page black, or a 1000 page color cartridge.

Print quality is good for the price. Monochrome prints appear black when they need to, and the grayscale is evenly spread and lacked any noticeable banding. Color images appeared a bit on the red side, but a quick adjustment using the printer web interface remedied that in seconds. Text was great, and images were good at the native 600 dpi. The print quality of the Phaser 6125 is good enough for most situations.

At a speed of up to 12 pages per minute for color and 16 pages for monochrome, the Phaser 6125 isn’t going to be breaking any speed records, but it is perfectly adequate for the low use market it is aimed at. Saying that, this printer has a monthly duty cycle of up to 40,000 pages per month, which is much more than the target market would ever use. I guess it’s nice to have that kind of flexibility, just in case a big print job comes along.

The Phaser 6125 offers solid performance and value for money. It doesn’t excel at anything, but if proficient enough to be a worthy contender in the color laser market.

OVERVIEW: With one of the smallest footprints for a color laser printer, the affordable and network-ready Xerox Phaser 6125 produces fast color prints right out of the box.

PROS:
Weighing in at 46 pounds and a height of 15”, the boxlike Phaser 6125’s has a true 15.5” x 17.5” footprint. Sitting on a normal office table, the 6125 sits at about elbow height.

In less than 14 seconds, the Phaser 6125 will start printing up to 16 black-and-white pages per minute. The selling point of this color laser comes with its speed. Using a single-pass print design, color prints can be as fast as 12ppm.

The 6125 comes with a 250-sheet cassette tray that supports up to legal-size (8½” x 14”) paper without expanding the printer’s footprint. A multi-purpose feed slot is built right into the paper tray for manual feeding transparencies, labels, post cards, envelopes, 3” x 5” postcards, and paper of various bond weights up to 90 lb.

Having built-in Ethernet network support and hi-speed USB, this printer is right at home either in the middle of an office floor or directly connected to a secretary’s computer. The built-in 64MB of printer memory is fixed, but enough for personal and small office printing needs.

The intuitive control panel on the Phaser 6125 has a multi-line LCD Display, plus buttons that make manual control of the printer relatively painless. By default, it immediately shows you the toner levels for each color. The control panel, toner levels, printer information, configuration, emulation, and network settings can be performed.

The printer produces up to 52dB of sound printing, while idling at 26dB. To give you an idea of what that means: 60 decibels is the level of typical conversations and 30 decibels is the level of a quiet room. You don’t want to have this printer stationed in a conference room chugging away when a meeting is in progress. But, when placed in the copy room or in the middle of a busy office floor, any printing noises will blend in with the background.

CONS:
One of the sacrifices of a color printer is print speeds. However the Phaser 6125 has unusually slow print speeds even in B&W mode at a 600 x 600 dpi resolution. While the color print speed is impressive, a business or office that prints mostly in monochrome should invest in a separate monochrome laser printer instead of relying on the 6125 for doing both jobs.

INK / TONER NEEDS:
The toner cartridges that come with the Phaser 6125 are only good for about 500 pages (or a lot fewer pages if you plan on doing a lot of printing photographic images). The black toner has double the print capacity of the 1,000-page color toners. To save on costs toner combo-packages are available