Although the solid-ink-based Xerox Phaser 8400 series offers expandability for a growing small business, its merely fair image quality might disappoint.

Design

The Phaser 8400B doesn't break any new design ground: it's your standard boxy workgroup printer, weighing 28kg and measuring 42.2cm wide by 36.8cm high by 53.3cm deep. It comes with a parallel port and a USB 2.0 connection, but not the cables themselves. The paper trays include a generous 525-sheet paper input drawer on the bottom of the printer, a 250-sheet output shelf on top, and a panel that opens up on the front to feed up to 100 sheets of non-standard paper such as card stock or envelopes.

What makes the Phaser 8400B different is its solid-ink technology. The Phaser 8400B uses a solid, resin-based ink instead of the traditional laser toner, which makes replacing the Xerox ink sticks incredibly easy. Just open a panel near the top of the printer, drop in the oddly shaped blocks of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink, then slide the sticks down a track until they come into contact with the print head -- much like those fit-the-shape-in-the-right-hole toys you had when you were young. A big advantage to this system is that you can load up to four ink sticks per track, so you don't have to wait until one runs out to replace it. Another advantage is that the waste cartridge collects leftover ink into a solid block that you can just dump in the bin (it's non-toxic).

On the top panel, an LCD lets you set up the printer, change paper type and print quality, tweak the connection setup, troubleshoot problems and access detailed information about such things as when and how to add more ink and how to cope with error messages.

Features

Although the Phaser 8400B costs a little more than the average entry-level colour laser, it offers a more comprehensive feature set. The combined paper capacity out of the box is 625 sheets and you can add two more 525-sheet cassettes (£349 each) for a total capacity of 1,675 sheets. The printer comes with 128MB of RAM that's expandable to 512MB, a fast 500MHz PowerPC processor, and native PostScript 3 and PCL5c emulation. That's a lot of power for a standalone printer without a network connection, so you'll need to add an Ethernet print server for £279 right away.

You can also add a 20GB hard drive for £419 and a duplexer for £309, or just buy the corresponding 8400N, 8400DP or 8400DX models, which come with these features already installed.

With solid-ink technology, the Phaser 8400B's overall ink costs are less than those of toner-based colour laser technology. Three-packs of cyan, magenta and yellow cost £68.49 each and print approximately 1,100 pages per stick, or about 3,400 pages per package. A three-pack of black ink costs £25.14, while a 6,800-print six-pack of black costs £42.48. This works out to about 6.8p per page with 5 percent coverage per colour, according to Xerox. A maintenance cartridge, which keeps the imaging drum cleaned and oiled lasts 10,000 pages, can be replaced for £59.82 or £94.50 for a 30,000-page drum. All prices mentioned above are excluding VAT.

Taking a page from the mobile phone manufacturers' book, the Phaser 8400B comes with a tiny SIM card that stores the printer's network ID and firmware, making it easy to transfer your printer configurations should you upgrade or repair the printer. The SIM card also includes Xerox's CentreWare IS embedded Web server software, which you can easily access by typing the printer's IP address into a Web browser. This software allows you to check the status of the printer, reconfigure it, access and generate usage reports, and check out an online job log from any browser with an Internet connection.

The Phaser 8400B comes with drivers for Windows, Mac, Novell, Linux and Sun operating systems.

Performance

The Phaser 8400B is the first colour laser we've seen that prints colour graphics faster than monochrome text. That's because solid-ink technology uses fewer moving parts than traditional colour laser technology, which must switch among four toner cartridges. But the speeds we obtained were nowhere near the vendor-rated 24 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome and colour.

On monochrome text, the Xerox came in at 8.06ppm, which is slow compared with the Lexmark C510n at 19.2ppm, although not entirely out of line with the HP Color LaserJet 3500 at 8.6ppm. On monochrome graphics, the Xerox came in at 8.1ppm for the Xerox, again well behind the Lexmark at 19.2ppm and much closer to the HP at 8.6ppm.

On the other hand, the Phaser 8400B's colour text speed was a very respectable 8.1ppm compared to the Color LaserJet 3500's 7.0ppm, and the C510n's 6.8ppm. But the Xerox Phaser 8400B excelled with colour graphics at 11.0ppm, where the C510n clocked in at only 6.4ppm, and the Color LaserJet 3500 came in at 8.8ppm.

Unfortunately, the Phaser 8400B's print quality was uneven and, in general, fell below the high quality expected with laser printing. All of the documents were shiny, as if they had a layer of wax coating them, giving each a distinctive and 'expensive' look. Monochrome text looked very dark and, thanks to the solid ink, bore an almost engraved quality. However, the curves of most letters looked jagged, especially in italic fonts viewed under the loupe. Monochrome graphics were also disappointing because the shiny, waxy coating was distracting; the gradients in our test document looked both dithered (meaning you could see that the picture was composed of individual droplets of ink) and mottled. Although the colour gradients looked better and the colour matching overall was quite good, colour graphics were extremely dithered (especially in the photo elements), but the shiny, textured ink gave a nice crisp finish to the line drawings.

One quirk of solid-ink technology is that you can't write over the ink with a pencil or a ballpoint pen because the waxy coating scratches off -- inconvenient when you need to make corrections on a hard-copy document. Instead, you'll need a felt-tip pen.

We tested the Phaser 8400B with its default factory settings. For additional tests, we adjusted the software driver to counter the above-mentioned problems and were able to improve the print quality.

Service & support

Xerox backs the Phaser 8400B with an industry-standard one-year warranty, which you can upgrade by one to three years with on-site service. Free phone support is available under warranty, Monday through Friday from 8.30am to 5pm.

Xerox provides the Phaser 8400B with an abundance of printed documentation, from a setup poster to four copies of a Quick Reference brochure to an on-CD user manual complete with video setup instructions, troubleshooting tips and a Usage Analysis tool for generating specific-usage reports. Xerox's Web site has drivers, a product-specific knowledge base with step-by-step solution guides, access to PhaserSmart (a Web-based troubleshooting device that your printer can communicate with if it's networked), FAQs and video instructions.

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