Printer Galery

Xerox Phaser 6000V/B

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 10:50:00 -0700

When Dell launched it entry-level colour LED printers last autumn, it let slip that they were built around a new print engine from Xerox. When we asked Xerox contacts if it would be releasing LED printers around the same engine, they tapped their noses in a knowing way. The Phaser 6000V/B is what they were tapping about and, at first sight, an asking price of £119 looks like something revolutionary for a colour page printer.
If Dell's printers are black, square cut and slightly sinister, Xerox’s are white, curvy and unexpectedly jolly looking. With a light blue output tray, which folds out from the top surface and a similar jaunty, translucent paper protector, which slides out from inside a pull-down front cover, this machine would be very at home in a trendy Internet bar.

Nine status indicator LEDs have been grouped together in a black disc to the left of the output tray and cover toner levels, paper jams and the usual attention conditions. Two buttons, labelled with OK and Cancel icons, are the only physical controls. At the back, a single USB socket provides the data connection.

The software CD offers drivers for Windows and OS X, and Xerox also supports Novell NetWare, Solaris and several flavours of Linux. There aren't many platforms this machine won't print from.
Xerox rates the Phaser 6000V/B at 16ppm for ISO black print and 12ppm for ISO colour. Both these figures are ambitious; our 5-page black text print produced 6.3ppm and this increased to 8.8ppm on the 12-page document. When waking from sleep mode, which is how the printer will typically spend most of its life, you can add an extra 23s to the start of each print, while the engine warms up and the host-based rasteriser processes the document.

The printer was marginally quicker on our five-page black text and colour graphics test than it was on the five-page text one, giving a speed of 6.7ppm. A 15 x 10cm photo, printed on A4 paper, completed in a speedy 12s.

If you were at all concerned that an LED-based printer wouldn't match the quality of a true laser engine, this printer calls the lie to that. Black text is razor sharp, easily good enough for any home or small office document.

Colours are bright and attention-grabbing and registration of black text over colour fills is excellent. Even our test photo print, which normally stresses laser and LED printers, produced a reasonable image. There was slightly more red in it than we would have liked, but smooth colour gradations and reasonable dark-area detail compensated for this.

It's worth mentioning that this printer is commendably quiet, with a measured peak of 57dBA, some way below rival entry-level laser printers.

The main thing dragging this printer down is the ludicrous cost of consumables. The best prices we could find for the toner cartridges are £49 for the 1,000 page colour ones and £58 for the 2,000 page black one. A set will cost £205, getting on for twice the cost of the printer itself.

If Xerox included these cartridges with the printer, rather than providing 500-sheet ‘starter’ consumables, it would be cheaper to buy a new printer than replace them. As it is, it still costs 3.7p for a ISO black page and a staggering 18.3p for a colour one, both including 0.7p for paper. This is the highest colour print cost of any single-function laser/LED printer we’ve tested.

Verdict

We criticised Dell for charging so much for its toner on the LED printers it released last year based on this engine, but it appears the costings came from Xerox. The colour cost of the Xerox toner is even higher than that from Dell and is disproportionate, even given the low asking price of the printer itself. Xerox's own 6125, a very similarly priced machine, costs 4p less per colour page than this one.

It's a great shame, as in other respects the Phaser 6000V/B is a lovely little entry-level colour page printer. It's reasonably quick – though not up to Xerox’s figures – produces good quality print and is well supported on a variety of different platforms. With a sensible consumables policy, it would score much higher.

Epson Stylus Office BX305FW

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 10:36:00 -0700

Not everybody uses inkjet all-in-ones for printing photos and for home and small offices, plain paper print is much more important. Epson has a range of small office inkjets, going under the brand Stylus Office. The Stylus Office BX305FW is an economically priced model, still offering print, scan, copy and fax.
The printer follows the general lines of Epson's recent releases, with its signature wave-shaped top to its fold-out, 30-sheet Automatic Document Feed (ADF) tray. The only paper feed is a near-vertical tray at the rear, which Epson rates at 120 sheets, but since that’s of 64gsm paper, you'll be lucky to get 100 sheets of 80gsm into it. The paper feeds to a two-stage, pull-out tray at the front.

The control panel, which has a textured grey surface and is fitted at a fixed angle, is quite crowded, with a large square for menu navigation, buttons to start and stop jobs, a number pad and five, fax quick-dial buttons. There's a two-line, text-only LCD display with no backlight, but good contrast, so it shows up well under overhead light.

There are no memory card slots or PictBridge socket in this machine, though, given its low price and target market, this is understandable.

At the back of the left-hand side are three sockets for USB, phone line and third-party handset. Most people will probably opt for wireless connection, though, which is standard. It can be set up through WPS setup with a couple of button presses, or you can enter a passcode, using the number pad.

Fold up the whole of the scanner section and you can get at the print head and its four ink cartridges. These clip in very easily and after the obligatory pumping are ready to print.

The Stylus Office BX305FW runs under Windows and OS X and there's a copy of Presto! PageManager 9 Standard included, to handle document management and OCR on both platforms. Other Epson software is provided, including applications for basic photo manipulation and printing Web pages.
Epson is among the most ‘optimistic’ manufacturers when it comes to print speeds. It claims speeds of 34ppm and 15ppm for black and colour print on this machine. Even assuming were talking draft mode, that’s still considerably faster than you're likely to see in real life. Our five-page black text document returned a speed of 3.6ppm and, although the draft mode speed measured 12.5ppm, that's quite a bit less than half the claimed speed.

Our five-page black text and colour graphics document was printed at 1.3ppm and this is pretty slow, even for a machine like this one, costing well under £100. A single-page colour copy took 53s and the five-page text copy from the ADF took 1:34, neither of which is particularly impressive. Finally, a 15 x 10cm photo on glossy paper took a very slow 3:24. In normal mode, it still took 1:33.

The text prints we produced are usual Epson fair, with noticeable jaggies around many characters, easily visible without magnification. Draft text is very light and looks like the output from a dot-matrix printer which hasn't seen a fresh ribbon in a while.

Colour graphics come out bright and smooth. Although there are dither patterns in evidence, these are only apparent when you look closely and black text over colour shows no signs of ink bleed. The colour copy maintains its colours well, though areas of solid fill look blotchier than in the original. Colour photos are well reproduced, with good levels of detail and colours which look as they should.

Two sets of cartridges are compatible with this printer, offering standard and high yields. Even the high-yield versions only average 400 pages, though, with the standard yield ones nearer to 180 pages. Epson doesn't price them expensively, so the cost per page comes out at 3.3p for black and 10.2p for colour, both including 0.7p for paper. While not cheap, you won't find much better costs for a printer at this price.

Verdict

Epson's Stylus Office BX305FW is a serviceable all-in-one for office use, with a bonus of full fax support and an ADF for scanning and copying multi-page documents. Print quality is only average and speeds are definitely on the slow side, but for under £70 at online prices, you get quite a bit of printer for your money.

Brother MFC-7860DW

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 10:14:00 -0700

The mono laser multifunction printer can fairly be described as a workhorse of the small office. It has taken the place of the photocopier as the major ‘can’t live without’ piece of desktop equipment, providing print, copy, scan and, in the case of Brother’s MFC-7860DW, fax.
This is a very neat little multifunction, not much wider than a length of A4 paper. The flatbed scanner has a low-profile Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) on top of its flatbed scanner, with a folding, 35-sheet feed tray.

The control panel runs the full width of the machine and, although it's quite busy, the function groups are well laid out. There are eight quick-dial buttons at the extreme left, then three short rows of fax, copy and print options.

In the centre there's a 2-line by 16-character, backlit LCD text display, with three illuminated mode buttons for fax, scan and copy in front. To the right of the display is a diamond of navigation keys, then a number pad and finally Start and Stop buttons at the right-hand end.

Below the control panel is the paper-out slot and the whole of the upper section of the printer can be hinged up on supports, in case of paper jams, though we still saw none during testing. Below the paper-out slot is a high-gloss strip bearing the Brother logo and this folds down to become a single-sheet paper feed, for special media. At the bottom of the front panel is a 250-sheet main paper tray.

The printer supports USB and 10/100 Ethernet connections, but you can also connect it wirelessly. If your router supports WPS setup, this only takes a couple of button presses.

The drum and toner cartridge is a two-piece consumable, though the toner cartridges clip into the drum assembly, as you can replace them a number of times before having to replace the drum.

Brother provides a copy of PaperPort 11SE for document management and OCR, as well as drivers for Windows and OS X. The company also provides support for Linux, through an optional driver download.
Brother rates the MFC-7680DW at 26ppm and our tests got quite close to this. Although the five-page text document only produced 14.3ppm, when we ran the 20-page long text document, the speed rose to 21.1ppm. The five-page text and graphics test produced 11.5ppm and when printing duplex, the 20-page document printed on 10 pages gave 10.5 sides per minute.

A single-page copy from the flatbed took just 10s and a five-page copy from the ADF took 23s, both of which are impressive speeds for a small machine like this. A 15 x 10cm photo on A4 paper took a slick 16s, even at the machine's highest resolution.

The quality of prints from the machine is very good, with clear, sharp black text looking almost letterpress in its precision, even though the default resolution is a fairly standard 600dpi.

The print engine can go up to 2,400 x 600dpi, but when we tried this to print our photo sample, we still saw some banding and loss of detail. Greyscale graphics also look blotchy with noticeable banding, whereas a copy of a printed page with greyscale graphics was even blotchier.

Although the MFC-7860DW can print duplex, it doesn't have a duplex scanner, so it can't copy a double-sided original. It can produce a double-sided copy from a single-sided original, though, which is also useful.

The toner cartridges have yields of 1,200 and 2,600 pages, neither of which is that generous and even the higher yield consumable gives a cost per page of 3.3p, which is a higher than some of its competitors, including some with a lower price tag.

Verdict

This type of multifunction printer is now a pretty mature product, so you wouldn't expect Brother to make any major errors in its design. You won't see any in the MFC-7860DW, which is a well made, quick and very functional piece of office equipment. It falls down a bit on the quality of copies with any greyscale content, but the main negative is its asking price, which appears high, given its feature set. Even allowing for duplex print, which isn't available in every multifunction printer, it’s hard to justify nearly £300.

Canon CanoScan LiDE 210

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 08:14:00 -0700

Flatbed scanners cover the full range of scanning needs, from single-page SOHO devices to high quality photo scanners and high throughput archival scanners. Canon’s CanoScan range is aimed at consumers and the LiDE 210 is a little above its entry-level offerings.
Since the introduction of the LiDE range, which stands for LED inDirect Exposure, most of Canon’s consumer scanners have an attractive, low-profile look. The combination of a Contact Image Sensor (CIS) scan head and LED rather than cold cathode illumination has meant the mechanism itself takes up very little room.

The dark grey body of the scanner has a pewter-coloured lid with an inset silver hinge that allows books to be scanned, as well as single sheets. At the front are five easy-scan buttons and at the back is a single miniature USB socket. The left-hand edge has fittings for a clip-on stand, as the scanner can be used flipped up close to the vertical, useful if desk space is particularly tight.

Physical connection couldn’t be much easier, as the CanoScan LiDE 210 draws all necessary power from its USB cable. Plug that in and the scanner springs to life, checks itself – make sure you’ve unlocked the scan head via the slide switch underneath – and sits in standby until asked to scan.

Canon’s ScanGear software is well designed and offers three basic scan modes. In Auto Scan, it sets everything for you and scans automatically, showing the result as a thumbnail. Basic mode enables you to select destination: screen or print, but most other parameters are still set to auto. In advanced mode, you can stipulate resolution and select treatments such as descreening and dust removal.

This three-tier approach caters for everything from a quick scan of a print, a document scan for OCR, and to semi-pro scanning of a photo for manipulation in third-party editing software.

As well as working through a TWAIN connection to a document editor, you can use any of the five buttons on the front of the scanner to perform one-touch scans. The left-hand two start and stop the scan to PDF function, so you can scan single or multiple pages and create a single PDF file from them.

The centre button is similar to the Auto Scan mode of ScanGear, while the right-hand two scan for copying (assuming you have a printer attached) and create an email with the scan appended as an attachment.
Scan speeds are good, with a full A4 page at 200dpi taking just 10 seconds. Add in optical character recognition on a 300dpi scan and it takes 17s. A 600dpi, full colour scan of a 15 x 10cm print takes 18s, so for the kind of occasional work the scanner is likely to see, speed should be more than adequate.

Scan image quality is reasonable for what is a budget device. Colours are fair, though there is an overall brightening, with colours showing lighter than in originals. There’s no scanner to screen calibration software provided, but you can adjust brightness, contrast and HLS (Hue Lightness Saturation) via software sliders at scan time.

Scanning our test targets revealed a couple of glitches in the vertical scan line panels, even scanned at 1,200ppi resolution. In passing, Canon’s ScanGear TWAIN applet only offers resolutions of up to 1,200ppi as options; you have to type in any higher resolution directly.

Clean up tools include descreening, which is good at removing moiré effects from scans of printed materials, and dust and scratch removal. This isn’t always effective. Our scratched and dusty sample still showed a lot of marks after scanning, but some smaller blemishes were reduced or removed altogether. Don’t expect too much from the tool.

The OCR built into Canon’s MP Navigator EX software is fine for pages using regular fonts and works quickly to extract editable text. It’s basic, though, and ends up with a simple text file opened in a text editor. There’s no attempt to retain formatting or feed through into Word.

Verdict

This is a good example of Canon’s home and enthusiast scanner offerings. Its compact, low-profile lines don’t hide a cheap and cheerful mechanism and for general purpose use, the combination of easy-use buttons and well designed support software provide a good system for photo print digitising, OCR and document archival. The ability to create multi-page PDF files with a few button pushes is a useful extra. If space is restricted, you can even flip the CanoScan LiDE 210 on its side.