Product Reviews

Xerox is a big name in the corporate printing world and has had notable success in the recent past with two high-speed workgroup laser printers, the N32 (reviewed issue 40, p165) and N40 (reviewed issue 50, p169), which won PC Pro's Recommended and Excellence awards respectively. But on the desktop, and up against other highly competitive inkjet companies, Xerox is a relative novice. While the likes of Epson, Lexmark and HP have consistently delivered impressive desktop colour inkjets at reasonable cost, Xerox has lagged behind and has only recently decided to start competing in this market. This inexperience has been evident in its previous offering. The predecessor to the new DocuPrint XJ8C, the XJ4C (reviewed issue 41, p165), was a relatively poor performer despite a novel design featuring a separate head and ink-well assembly.

The XJ8C clearly has a small mountain to climb if it wants to impress and, while it doesn't compare with the Epson 740 (reviewed issue 50, p171) - which also currently features on our A List (see p68) - it does represent a step forward for the famous copier company. It's not the quickest, the best quality nor the most rugged inkjet that could sit on your desk, but it's more versatile and functional as well as being smaller than the XJ4C. With a following wind and a spot of tinkering with the supplied software, it's also capable of printing a better quality of image than its predecessor.

What Xerox has done with the XJ8C is licensed Lexmark's printing technology and add its own paper input and output attachments, along with the familiar red X, which appears on the front of the box. Of course, the technology isn't quite up to date, but the Xerox-designed, iMac-style translucent blue paper input tray is intelligently formed and capable of neatly feeding 150 A4 sheets quite comfortably.

The XJ8C is certainly nicely designed, borrowing Lexmark's tried and tested case design as well as its printing technology. Its rounded fascia, unblemished apart from the solitary power button and associated LED, lifts up like the bonnet of a car to reveal the belt-driven print mechanism

Inserting the pair of print cartridges (one colour and one black) is both simple and straightforward, and printing is a pleasantly quiet affair, even if you lift the lid up to see what's going on. It's a bit worrying having the lid up though, as a veritable pool of colour seems to wash across the page when printing dark colours. My anxiety was borne out when I got my hands on the finished item; I had to be careful because the print was extremely ink-heavy and the paper, especially if you use the plain sort, will buckle under the watery weight. Still, when the dark ink eventually dries out, most of it is in the right place and represents a fair approximation of the original.

On photo quality paper, the XJ8C makes a better stab at reproducing photographic images. Printing a full-page A4 colour photo can take as little as six minutes and the results will fool all but the most discerning eye from a couple of feet away. A bit of tweaking with the supplied software can improve matters further but, at £26 per photo colour cartridge, proofing can be an expensive business. The spiky rollers that feed in the paper can mark thicker photo paper and this harms the image far more than the odd area of dodgy colour saturation.

On large areas of single colour, a disturbing degree of banding becomes evident too. This is less of a problem on the high-quality photographic paper than it is on other media types, but it's there nonetheless and it's unsightly. Monochrome text output - usually the main staple of a desktop inkjet - is surprisingly crisp, however, although characters do take on rough edges in certain fonts or styles. Solid blacks are good too, and you get a pretty good variation of greyscales. The odd glitch can send too much ink through the head, thus causing letters to appear spidery. It may be an occasional phenomenon rather than the rule, but it's yet another annoyance.

Replacement ink cartridges are a little on the expensive side and this results in a higher than average price per page. Based on Xerox's claims, the XJ8C's black ink refill cartridge will give you a page printed at five per cent coverage for a rather expensive 2.4p climbing steeply to 9.6p for colour prints at five per cent coverage per colour.

The XJ8C is, at the very least, a step in the right direction compared with previous Xerox inkjets. The printer does come with a noteworthy three-year warranty. But at this price point there's some tough competition for desktop space which is too tough for this Xerox. The XJ8C may be a competent printer but it's little more than that. Better printers exist both in terms of quality and speed - notably from Lexmark and Epson - for around the same price.