Tektronix Phaser 780 Plus

Tektronix has always had strong representation in this area, with not only a full range of colour lasers on the market but also a string of thermal wax-based page printers. The company's latest Phaser 780 Plus brings its experience and expertise to A3 colour printing, an even more sparsely populated area of the market.

To look at, the 780 Plus isn't anything special: just a large beige box with flip-down input and output trays on either side for unusually sized or particularly hefty media, an output tray on top and an input tray capable of holding up to 250 sheets of A3-sized paper. On the top is a relatively easy to navigate control panel, and around the back you'll find both parallel and 10BaseT Ethernet connections.

At the printer's heart beats a 133MHz processor, which is backed up by a whopping 192Mb of RAM, as well as true Adobe PostScript 3 and PCL5c. Similar to the 740DX before it, the 780 Plus is a 16ppm device when printing in black and white and 4ppm for colour, while its maximum resolution in both modes is an impressive 1,200 x 600dpi. Compared to the only other A3 colour laser we've reviewed - the Lexmark Optra Color 1200N (reviewed issue 49, p160) - this makes impressive reading. The only thing that suffers is its colour printing speed, which due to its use of a single head mechanism rather than the four of the Lexmark, means it has to run at a quarter of its mono print speed.

Manufacturers' claims often fall short of the mark, however, so we set out to check Tektronix's assertions with a strenuous programme of real-world print tests. In terms of black and white printing, the 780 showed itself to be more than capable: in fact when pushed with a 40-page plain-text test on A4 paper it managed a fraction over its claimed speed at 16.1ppm. It's extremely impressive and faster than the Optra Color by a clear 4ppm. Add a touch of colour to your pages and things don't look as rosy. Printing a 23-page Word document with plenty of fonts and formatting, photos, graphs and drawings, drew just over 3ppm from the 780 Plus. A simpler job, with only a few tables and graphs, saw no improvement, but then printing the same tests in the printer's Enhanced mode surprisingly had no adverse affect on speed either.

Printing the 23-page test on A3 with the pages side by side (2-Up as it's known in the trade) did, however, slow things down a bit. The whole test was produced at a rate of 1.8 A3 pages per second.

It's clear then, in colour at least, that Tektronix's latest colour marvel can't touch its rival the Lexmark Optra Color 1200N for speed. What it can do is thoroughly trounce it in terms of quality. The output that dropped into the tray after all of these tests was stunning and had a glossy sheen similar to that found in the output of its wax ink-based siblings. The colours it produced were vibrant. Multicoloured and single-tone fills were smooth and uninterrupted, and photographic output was detailed and well balanced. Only one minor niggle - a slightly grainy, inconsistent reproduction of mid-grey tones - marred a highly impressive performance. It's certainly up there with HP's 4500 DN (reviewed issue 51, p169 ), which is currently our pick of the A4 colour crop.

In terms of network connectivity, the 780 Plus is as impressive as the 740DX. On a Novell NetWare 5.1 network I had everything up and running in no time at all - Tektronix's PhaserShare utility scans the network for queues, displays a list of available printers, and allows you to create your own queues too. For peer-to-peer network users, Tektronix's PhaserPort lets you use TCP/IP instead, and the printer's embedded HTTP server permits remote management and provides basic monitoring services.