Product Reviews

Aimed primarily at professional graphics designers, the Tektronix Phaser 380 builds on the successes of the Phaser 350 (reviewed issue 26, p186) and adds full-colour bleed printing on paper sizes up to A3 and 332 x 471mm Tabloid. Naturally, with the extra width, the 380 is considerably larger than its A4-capable cousin measuring 600 x 507 x 642mm (W x H x D) with a weight to match. It takes four people to move its 100kg bulk using the slide-out handles fitted underneath.

A single tray provides basic paper handling with capacity for 250 sheets, which can be extended by adding a second 250-sheet tray underneath (£580). Transparencies and heavier media are dealt with by a flip-down multipurpose tray at the front, although this can only handle one sheet at a time.

The 380 uses the same unique solid ink printing technology as the 350. Blocks of a coloured waxy substance are melted into reservoirs, and a complete page image is injected through nozzles onto a rotating drum before being pressed onto the paper where it dries instantly. The big advantage of the technique is that the printer is less picky about paper quality and the wax doesn't suffer from colour bleeding. In fact, you get the same level of quality on plain old copier paper as any other media.

Solid ink printing also has a downside. When you switch the printer on it runs an initial cleaning cycle that has an expensive appetite for ink, so the printer needs to be left permanently switched on. Furthermore, it needs to be configured to drop back to standby rather than sleep mode, otherwise it runs a cleaning process whenever it wakes up, again wasting ink. Also, you can't move the printer while it's switched on, as melted wax can easily spill over the drum and ruin it.

Printing costs are substantially higher for the 380 than the 350, partly because Tektronix hasn't extended its offer of free black ink for every colour block you buy and also because the ink blocks are more expensive. Each block costs £67 for a pack of two colour blocks and £52 for a brace of black. All last

The ink blocks now have a slightly different chemical composition to those used by the 350, the main aim being to produce better quality colour. Testing backed this up: the prints we produced had a vibrancy only rivalled by the Hewlett-Packard Colour LaserJet 5M (reviewed issue 19, p115). The new blocks also have a different melting point to allow duplex printing - a feature not available with the 350.

The basic Phaser 380 comes with 16Mb of memory, but will only do a maximum resolution of 300 x 300dpi. We tested the 380EF (extended features) model, which comes with 48Mb of memory for a true resolution of 600 x 300dpi. The extra memory also enables a first-page check feature and job collation, but you'll also need to fit a SCSI hard disk for the latter (£500).

Three different print modes can be selected from the extensive PostScript driver panel. For A4 printing a fast mode uses less ink and delivers 3.5ppm, while the standard 300 x 300dpi mode drops it to 2.5ppm, and the enhanced mode prints at 600 x 300dpi for 1.2ppm. A3 printing slows things down further to 2ppm, 1.3ppm and 0.6ppm respectively. During testing we found the quoted speeds to be accurate, and overall print quality superb.

A slight graininess is evident due to the low resolution, but there's little stepping between graduated tints, and grey shades using equal cyan, yellow and magenta mixes are better than many colour lasers. Results using A3 paper are also impressive, with only minimal banding. And there was no evidence of the striping that frequently marred print quality on the Phaser 350 while we had it on long-term test.

Network connection is managed by a PhaserShare Ethernet card. However, it's not fitted as standard to either the basic or the extended features models; a bit strong considering the cost of the printer. An administration utility allows the printer to be managed over IPX - including full support for NDS (NetWare Directory Services) - and an embedded HTTP server also lets you manage access printer settings over TCP/IP via a standard Web browser.

The Phaser 380 takes Tektronix's solid ink printing technology to new heights and combines it with A3 capabilities. Competition in this price range comes from colour lasers, which only handle A4-sized paper, so if your graphics department needs the features and you're budget is less than five figures, there's little else to choose from.