Product Reviews

With the price of personal mono laser printers dropping to the level normally associated with high-end inkjets, the benefits of laser technology are becoming ever more affordable. Samsung's excellent ML6060 mono laser printer (reviewed issue 74, p177) is an example of a genuine alternative to the personal inkjet printer, with its excellent 12ppm print speed and even better price of £262. Xerox's DocuPrint P1210 is their latest 12ppm mono laser, in the same category as the ML6060, although at £392 it remains to be seen if the P1210 can maintain the trend of quality and affordability established by Samsung.

The P1210 is a single-user device, boasting 12ppm print speed and 4Mb of RAM as standard. Networkability is an option, however, with the addition of a £118 external 10BaseT network adaptor, which connects to the parallel port.

The internal paper tray accepts 250 sheets of A4 copy paper, which is disappointing and means that you will have to separate a full ream and then store the remaining 250 sheets. This is not strictly a technical flaw, although it is an annoying design oversight. To compensate for this, however, there's the option to add an additional 550-sheet auxiliary tray for £155, which increases the total A4 paper capacity to a more respectable 800 sheets.

At the heart of the P1210's print engine sits a 66MHz RISC processor, which is supported by 4Mb of RAM. While 4Mb of RAM is sufficient to handle normal text printing and basic DTP, more memory will be required to print large files at the enhanced resolution of 1200dpi. Thankfully, Xerox has made the upgrade path uncomplicated and economical thanks to the use of standard 72-pin EDO memory, which can boost the printer's capacity up to a maximum of 68Mb.

Testing began with our 50-page plain-text document, which was completed in four minutes, 13 seconds, giving an output speed of 11.85ppm. This tallies with Xerox's quoted speed of 12ppm and is coincidentally the time recorded by the ML6060. The P1210 edges ahead slightly in terms of print quality, though, with superbly crisp text printed in a solid black.

The P1210 also handled the more memory-intensive mixed text and

ADVERTISEMENT

graphics DTP document well, managing an impressive 9.1ppm. Quality was again good and although the output speed was less than the claimed 12ppm maximum, it's faster than the 7.8ppm achieved by the ML6060. The bottleneck of only having 4Mb of memory is probably to blame for the drop in speed during this test and a simple memory upgrade would likely boost performance.

The P1210 continued to impress with our 12-page Excel spreadsheet test, which was completed in 63 seconds at an excellent 11.4ppm. Although not quite up to the printer's maximum speed, the quality of printing was generally superb, with only the smallest of the font sizes becoming illegible against the block-filled backdrops. At font sizes of ten-point and above the text was clearly defined and set firmly against solid shades, with little evidence of the ugly dithered tones often produced by budget laser printers.

Unfortunately, our quality test sheet refused to print at the resolution-enhanced maximum 1,200dpi setting, returning a memory error. However, dropping to 600dpi still produced good results. The P1210 dealt superbly with scaled fonts, managing to reproduce readable text even at two-point. However, images were not handled quite so well, with smooth greyscale shades showing noticeable stepping and dithering, although the overall print quality is still comparable to the ML6060.

One of the major benefits of laser printers over inkjet printers is their high level of economy and the P1210 is no exception. As well as Energy Star power-management functions, the P1210 also employs a similar combined toner/drum kit to that seen in both the ML6060 and Kyocera's FS-1000 (reviewed issue 74, p179). Xerox offers a 6,000-page toner/drum kit for £80, which boils down to about 1.3p per page - slightly higher than the 1.1p per page from the ML6060. For users with a lighter print load, the lower capacity 3,000-page kit costing £51 should suffice, although costs per page rise to 1.7p.

The P1210 also has a useful Toner Saver feature that will help increase economy further by reducing the amount of toner placed on a page. This options works best with plain text, where the slight loss of contrast is far less noticeable than with graphics, and on the whole it's a commendable feature.

The DocuPrint P1210 is an excellent laser printer, offering superb text printing at its full 12ppm maximum speed while also delivering graphics performance on a par with the best in this class. The fantastic features and simple memory-upgrade path are also a bonus. However, the P1210 is let down in one vital area: price. It costs £130 more than the Samsung ML6060 and as both offer similar features and performance, ultimately the ML6060's superb value for money keeps it firmly on top.