Xerox Phaser 6128MFP/N review

As prices for laser printers drop steadily, small businesses are finding that colour printing is no longer the luxury they once thought it was. The Phaser 6128MFP from Xerox takes this to the next stage as this compact A4 laser combines colour printing with scan, copy plus fax functions, yet comes in at a very affordable price.

Targeting busy professionals and small workgroups, the 6128MFP has a generous 384MB of memory and claims print speeds of 12ppm for colour and 16ppm for mono. Installation is handled nicely by an automated routine and users get a local status utility that pops up with each print job. The backlit LCD display is simple to use and the CentreWare web server provides easy access to all configuration details.

From the printer you can run colour or mono scans directly to email or to a networked system via FTP or SMB. You need to create entries using CentreWare that describe either an email recipient or a destination system and target folder, which appear as options in the printer's scan menu. Fax operations are just as easy to use and the printer can hold a speed dial list of up to 200 entries. Scan and fax functions can also be restricted by requiring a password to be entered at the printer.

Xerox claims colour printing can be controlled but the user guide is devoid of instructions. It was only after rooting around the printer driver properties that we found an option where administrators of local systems can stop other users printing in colour.

Documents can be faxed directly from your PC via the driver although to access the printer's address book you need a USB connection. The Secure Print feature allows a username and password to be assigned to a print job which is then held in the printer's 100MB RAM disk. Only when the correct password is entered at the printer control panel will it be released.

Print quality is reasonably good, with our performance chart revealing smooth colour fades with minimal stepping. Colour photographs had a richness and vibrancy to them with good levels of detail, although in large areas of single colours, such as blue skies, we could see a faint and slightly annoying magenta banding.

Print speeds aren't perfect with a 16-page Word document taking 77 seconds for an average of only 12.5ppm. Colour speeds were on money with our 24-page DTP style document averaging 12.3ppm. A handy feature is the Run Black mode so you can continue printing even if one of the colour cartridges has run out.

We strongly recommend shopping around for your toner as prices vary wildly and the wrong choice could result in steep printing costs. After some research we found the best price of 10.6p for a colour page but also found prices as high as 16p per page. Either way, this is not good and made worse by the fact that the printer ships with 1,000 page starter cartridges.

The 6128MFP is offering a fine range of features for the price teamed up with a good software bundle and some useful print security options. It would be a good choice for amalgamating all your office printing functions into one unit if it weren't for its uncomfortably high running costs.

Author: Dave Mitchell