Tektronix Phaser 850DX

With the acquisition of Tektronix's colour printing division in January, Xerox has moved firmly into second place behind HP in the worldwide office colour printing market. Along with the range of Phaser colour lasers, Xerox gets its hands on Tektronix's unique solid ink technology. We last saw this with the Phaser 840DP (reviewed issue 56, p165) which impressed with a fine combination of speed, quality and value, making it a worthy alternative to HP's Color LaserJet 4500 DN (reviewed issue 51, p169).

Solid ink technology is simpler than laser printing as it uses blocks of resin that are melted into reservoirs and then squirted onto a rotating drum using piezo-electric inkjet print heads. The image is pressed onto the paper in one pass where it solidifies almost instantly. Some of the resin bonds with the paper fibres and the remainder stands proud of the paper, giving the final image a gloss and a texture. The resin blocks are placed in keyed slots under the top panel and more can be added during printing.

The new Phaser 850 doesn't improve on the top resolution, but print speeds for both mono and colour are boosted to 14ppm. However, this is only available using a Fast Colour mode that prints at a draft 300dpi resolution. Three other modes are available - an 8ppm Standard mode, an 800 x 500dpi Enhanced mode printing at 4ppm, and a top-quality 1,200 x 600dpi Photo mode that drops print speeds to 2ppm.

The top-of-the-range Phaser 850DX on review comes with a generous 128Mb, and one spare DIMM socket allows this to be upgraded to 256Mb using industry-standard modules. An integrated paper tray holds 200 A4 sheets, but you also get an extra 500 A4 sheet capacity lower tray, and a second can be added for a total of 1,200 sheets. Duplexing is standard on both the 850DP and the 850DX, and it's an unusual operation as once the first side is printed it's snatched back at the last second, turned over internally and returned with both sides printed.

The printer has Type C parallel and USB ports along with a PhaserShare 10/100BaseTX Ethernet print server. An internal 6Gb hard disk offloads the collation of multicopy documents from the host PC and it's preloaded with Tektronix's software, so users can install printer drivers from the PhaserLink Web browser interface.

The PhaserShare Administrator utility made installation on our NetWare 5 network simple, with a quick setup routine for selecting NDS (Novell Directory Services) trees and creating and assigning printer and print queue objects. Using PhaserPort, all Windows 95 and 98 users can also print directly to the printer in peer-to-peer mode over TCP/IP. The printer can be managed directly via a Web browser and the PhaserLink interface is one of the best yet. All printer settings can be accessed and modified and consumable status monitored. Job accounting provides in-depth information on who's been using the printer, and the printer can send email alerts when problems occur.

During testing we found all the quoted print speeds were achievable - a 15-page Word document was delivered in Fast Colour mode in 65 seconds for a perfect 14ppm, which slowed to 7.8ppm in Standard mode. Colour prints were dealt with just as efficiently, with a draft print of a five-page colour business report completed at 14ppm and 4ppm in Enhanced mode. Even a 23-page DTP document with large graphics, photos and heavy formatting didn't trouble the Phaser, with a draft print returned at 14ppm and 2ppm in Photo mode. Duplexing was just as efficient, delivering at a rate of 6.5ppm in Standard mode.