Product Reviews

A colour laser printer is never likely to win awards for aesthetics, but we were impressed with the moderate size and weight of the Xerox Phaser 6130. One of the sacrifices made to achieve its compact dimensions is the lack of a duplex unit to print both sides of the paper. The 250-sheet input tray is adequate, but the single-page feed slot is a little disappointing and not easily accessible.

Changing the toners is very simple via the panel on the right, and the LCD display is useful for changing settings and troubleshooting. The 6130 has an Ethernet port, so you can plug it into your network router for easy sharing between PCs; we found it was recognised on our

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network without any problems. There's also a USB High-Speed port for connecting directly to a PC.

Test results were better than we expected from a colour laser at this price. Although the print speed of the 600dpi engine was average, the quality of both colour documents and photo prints was acceptable. Our black-and-white gradient tests came out with very little banding, and picture quality was decent. The printer was let down by the quality of its text output, though, and coupled with average print times this makes it less well suited to everyday office and correspondence tasks. Nor would the 6130 suit heavy business use, since the drum is only rated to last 30,000 prints and isn't user-replaceable.

On the face of it, the Phaser 6130 looks good. Print quality was OK and speeds adequate for a model of this kind. However, set against the reasonable purchase price are the running costs, which work out expensive for both mono and colour pages, at 1.9 and 7.9 pence respectively. A slightly larger initial investment would probably serve you better in the long run.

This printer would be adequate for domestic use, but there are cheaper and better options available, especially if you're happy to connect via USB rather than needing Ethernet.