Xerox Phaser 1235 DT

Colour is still only used relatively sparsely in the general office-printing environment, and one of the reasons for this has been relatively slow print performance. The majority of inkjet printers are simply too slow and too under-specified to cope with the rigours of the modern office and the majority of workgroup colour laser printers still only reach speeds of around 4ppm (pages per minute) in colour. However, single-pass printing, as featured in the Xerox Phaser 1235 DT on review here,æhelp bring colour print speeds up to levels approaching that of mono printing and could helps make workgroup colour printing the norm, rather than the exception.

At first glance you would be forgiven for thinking that this printer was actually Oki's C7200n (reviewed issue 76, p151), as both share almost identical chassis. Delve a little deeper and you'll also discover that the Xerox and Oki share the same single-pass LED printing technology and quoted print speeds of 12ppm in colour and 20ppm in mono. However, Xerox has chosen a 366MHz Intel processor instead of the Oki's 400MHz Power PC part, and supported this with a useful 128Mb of RAM, which can be upgraded to a maximumæof 512Mb.

However with a 64Mb module costing £560 (£431 more than for the Oki C7200n), upgrading will be expensive. Other features on offer here include a duplex unit, an internal 5Gb hard disk drive and a secondary 530-sheet A4 paper tray, all of which are available as options on the Oki C7200n. The Phaser 1235 DT is also fully network ready.

IT managers will be pleased to see the use of separate consumables for both toner and drum units. Consumable costs are reasonable enough, with each 10,000-page colour cartridge costing £156 and a 10,000-page black cartridge costing £70. Out of the box, the Phaser 1235 DT comes equipped with lower capacity 5000-page cartridges, which cost £44 for black and £98 for each colour cartridge. This gives initial running costs of 7.7p per colour page andæ1.19p per mono page.

Given the similarities in the design between the Oki C7200n and the Xerox Phaser 1235 DT, I was interested to see how the results would compare. The first test was our 50-page plain text document, printed using the normal setting of 600 x 600dpi using the supplied Adobe PostScript 3 driver. The Phaser 1235 DT got off to a cracking start, completing the test in a mere two minutes and 32 seconds at 19.7ppm, tallying with Xerox's quoted speed of 20ppm. Text was also impressively crisp and displayed an attractive glossy finish, giving it a very professional look.

Next up was our heavily formatted 24-page DTP document, which contains several photographic images, a selection of graphic images and text in a variety of fonts and typefaces. At the printer's maximum 600 x 1,200dpi resolution the test was completed in a shade over two minutes, 11.9ppm, significantly improving upon the 8.5ppm achieved by the Oki C7200n, although this only has 64Mb of memory. Print quality was also excellent. In particular, photographs and graphic images were reproduced with vivid colours and excellent contrast, although certain fine details were not reproduced well.

The Phaser 1235 DT also impressed us with its capable handling of our test A4, full-colour photographic images. Our 18Mb PhotoCD image was reproduced with impressive skill, displaying natural, bright colours. A closer inspection did reveal a lack of fine detail, probably due to inaccurate toner placement, and smudging as the paper passed through the fuser.