Design
The Xerox Phaser 6180/N is a monster of a machine, best suited to spacious offices. The all-white printer sits 40cm wide by 47cm high by 49.3cm deep, and weighs a hefty 28.3kg. Colour laser printers tend to be larger than monochrome printers, because the four individual toner cartridges (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) are arranged in a single row.
The main paper cassette pulls out from the front of the printer and holds up to 250 sheets of plain paper. You can adjust this to hold sheets as large as 220mm by 355.6mm. The front panel of the printer folds out to reveal a 150-sheet multipurpose tray — handy for one-off print jobs on media other than what you'd normally keep in the cassette (Xerox also offers an optional 550-sheet paper tray for a whopping £335 ex. VAT). The paper well in the top of the printer serves as the (300-sheet-capacity) output tray and a fold-out flap helps control long sheets.
The basic control panel comprises just a few buttons for navigating the menu, a two-line text LCD, and a wake-up button for nudging the printer out of power-save mode. The menus mostly address maintenance issues and paper-selection options. The LCD constantly displays the various toner levels, so you know when you're about to run out of a particular colour — an incredibly helpful feature for preventing emergency toner refill runs.
Features
The Xerox Phaser 6180 comes in two configurations, the £335 (ex. VAT) 6180/N and the £489 (ex.. VAT) 6180/DN. Both models ship with a 400MHz processor, 128MB of memory (upgradeable to 1GB), plus Ethernet, USB 2.0 and parallel connectors; wireless connectivity in the shape of an 802.11a/b/g module, is an optional extra costing £152 (ex. VAT). The 6180/DN model adds a duplexer for automatic double-sided prints, which is a great way to save both money and trees.
Xerox offers two types of toner cartridges, standard- and high-capacity. The high-capacity toner cartridges are obviously more expensive, but they save you money in the end because the per-page cost is lower. For the 6180 series, the 2,000-page-capacity standard colour cartridges cost £62, while the 3,000-page black cartridge costs £58 (ex. VAT). The 8,000-page high-capacity black cartridge costs £125 (ex. VAT), while the 6,000-page high-capacity colour cartridges cost £135 (ex. VAT). This works out to about 2 pence per page for black prints with standard cartridges and 1.6p with high-capacity cartridges, and about 11p (standard) and 8p (high-capacity) per page for colour prints. These costs are within the normal range for a colour laser printer, although theDell 3110cn's per-page costs are lower, while the Lexmark C530dn's print costs are slightly higher.
Performance
The Xerox Phaser 6180/N is a fast performer, but not the fastest we've seen. It printed black text at a rate of 17.19 pages per minute (ppm) and black graphics at a rate of 17.44ppm. The comparably priced Lexmark C530dn scored 17.02ppm and 16.36ppm, respectively, while the Dell 3110cn outpaced all the competition, printing black text at a lightning-fast 23.36ppm and black graphics at an impressive 22.58ppm. The Phaser 6180/N slowed down a bit for colour prints, which is normal for printers. It turned out colour text at 14.76ppm and colour graphics at 15.81ppm — just a bit faster than most of its competition.
The Phaser 6180/N made excellent work of black text prints. The characters printed out clean, sharp and dark — even when reduced to very small point sizes. The colour text prints were good but not perfect: we saw some minor errors in character formation and noticed cross-hatching in some of the more difficult colours, although the latter problem plagues most colour laser printers. We were very impressed by the black graphics prints. The graphics and photo elements showed excellent detail and were free of the crosshatches common to lasers. The colour graphics print also displayed excellent detail and a pleasing saturation of colors (although the colours tended to be a bit ruddy), but we saw banding in what should be a smooth greyscale. It also had some minor problems handling barcode patterns. Overall, we were pleased with the quality of the prints from the Phaser 6180/N, but slightly preferred those we saw from the Lexmark C530dn.
Service and support
Xerox backs the Phaser 6180/N with a one-year warranty, but you can upgrade this to two or three years for £108 (ex. VAT) or £160 (ex. VAT) respectively. Telephone support is available and Xerox's well-organised Web site offers software and driver downloads, a troubleshooting knowledge base, video tutorials and manuals.
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