Xerox DocuPrint P8ex review

Traditionally, Xerox's mono lasers have received a warm welcome at PC Pro, with its high-speed workgroup printers regularly collecting Recommended awards. It also fared well at the SoHo level, with the Adobe PrintGear-equipped DocuPrint P12 delivering an impressive combination of high quality and solid value (reviewed issue 52, p174). The personal laser market is a different ball game altogether though, with manufacturers fighting tooth and nail for a piece of the action. The DocuPrint P8 printers represent Xerox's latest stab at this end of the market, but on the surface Xerox doesn't seem to be offering anything so remarkable to make these models stand out from the crowd.

The P8ex on review is the top of a range of three printers and offers a 600 x 600dpi resolution along with an 8ppm print speed. The only unusual feature is a USB interface along with the standard parallel port. Few printer manufacturers have bothered to include USB support, with Brother being the only notable exception. There are few advantages to be gained here. Only Windows 98 is supported at present and the real-time status monitor can't provide any information about activity, as it requires a bidirectional parallel port link to receive data from the printer.

Processing power is under par as the P8ex is equipped with a modest 33MHz chip, backed with 4Mb of memory that can be upgraded to 36Mb. As we found during testing, the standard memory will need to be increased if you're planning to print complex documents or large graphics. The small controller board has a single SIMM socket, which accepts industry-standard EDO modules. That's fortunate, as Xerox charges a staggering £89 for an 8Mb upgrade.

The P8ex is a compact block of plastic measuring only 345 x 224 x 365mm (W x H x D). A single feeder at the rear holds up to 150 sheets of A4, while a second slot in the front acts as a manual feed. An output hopper in front has room for 100 sheets, and a flip-down panel beneath can be used to flatten the paper path for heavier media such as envelopes.

Running costs are reasonable and compare well with the competition. The large toner cartridge (£75) lasts for 5,000 sheets at five per cent coverage, resulting in printing costs of 1.5p per page. Only Kyocera's EcoSYS FS-680 (reviewed issue 59, p155) beats this significantly with overall costs of 1p per page. Note that the starter cartridge supplied with the P8ex only has a 2,500-sheet capacity, so initial costs will be high.

Installation under Windows 98 was simple enough for both USB and parallel port connections. Along with the status monitor you get a remote control utility, which allows printer settings to be viewed and modified. From here, you can control the power-saving mode, select default fonts and paper sizes, modify print density and run a test. Any new settings can be downloaded directly to the printer using either the parallel or USB port.

Both PCL5e and PCL6 emulations are provided, with the latter offering more control over output. You can choose 300 or 600dpi and select image enhancement for a simulated 1,200dpi resolution. It's possible to use overlays to personalise documents, and custom watermarks can be added too. Multiple images can also be printed on a single page, although we found this feature didn't work as the output option required to achieve this was missing from the driver panel.

We tested performance over the USB and parallel interfaces and found no differences between them. Print speeds will depend on the type of document being produced, with a 15-page Word document delivered in 125 seconds at a shade over 7ppm. Initial tests using the heavily formatted 23-page PC Pro mono laser test ground to a halt as the printer stopped with memory overruns when it reached the pages containing large photographs. With an extra 8Mb of memory on board, the printer ceased complaining but only delivered the 23-page document at a pedestrian 2.25ppm.