Labs

Clad in PLAIN grey, the Xerox is an office titan. At 470mm high it's the tallest printer here, and at 28kg one of the weightiest. But that weight translates into formidable build quality. The chassis felt incredibly robust. When we opened the front to install the four toner cartridges, a geared mechanism ensured the door dropped slowly and smoothly. Very pleasing. Our only gripe (and we're really splitting hairs) is that the sheet feed tray at the front is secured by friction alone, rather than having a push-button catch.

We were impressed by the bright two-line LCD, its intuitive menu system operated by a handful of buttons. Looking around the back, we were pleased to see that in addition to the standard USB2 port the Phaser 6180 was one of only three printers here (along with the Brother and the Oki) that provides an Ethernet network connection as standard. Attaching the printer to your PC with an Ethernet cable will transfer data faster than with USB, or you can plug it into a router to share with other PCs on your network.

Running commentary

The Xerox's toner cartridges slot easily into place at the front of the machine, and are individually keyed to prevent the colours being inserted into the wrong locations - something that shouldn't cause any damage, but obviously leads to bizarre results.

Before plugging everything in, we installed the Xerox software from the supplied CD. We were surprised when a message popped up telling us that the software didn't support the operating system we were using (Windows Vista Ultimate Edition) - after all, the Phaser 6180 is a new model. As it turned out, this didn't cause any problems, since the software just connected to the Internet and took us directly to the appropriate page on Xerox's web site to download a Vista-compatible driver.

When we'd finally it

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got up and running, the Phaser 6180 confirmed our favourable first impressions. It handled our 50-page mono text document with aplomb, churning out the first page in just five seconds and going on to complete the test in two minutes and 12 seconds. That wasn't quite the fastest result here, but not far behind, translating into a more than reasonable 22ppm, just shy of Xerox's claimed 25ppm. Text was crisp and black but not too dark, and avoided all the usual pitfalls such as breaking up into spidery lines around thinner, trickier parts of the letters, such as serifs.

Colour photo prints were among the best. One of our hi-res images, a close-up of some Euro banknotes, is a key test of a printer's definition. Here, the fine cross-hatching on the money was reproduced beautifully. Colours were vibrant throughout - if anything, slightly too saturated when compared side by side with the neutral tones produced by the HP, but the overall effect was pleasing. This bold, bright approach is particularly suited to business documents. The graphs and charts in our report all appeared clean and crisp, and the printer successfully distinguished between shades of grey.

The Xerox was only one of only two printers here (the other being the HP) supplied with an alternative PostScript driver. With regular PCL (Printer Command Language) output, the PC does all the work of creating the page. Using PostScript, the PC sends a description of the page elements, which are then rendered by the printer itself. PostScript is the basis of most professional graphics software and traditionally used for high-end repro work; with entry-level printers such as these, which have only a small amount of built-in memory, PostScript usually ends up giving much the same result more slowly, and so it proved here. Using the PostScript driver, the Xerox printed a hi-res PDF of Computer Buyer's cover in 47 seconds, seven seconds longer than using PCL. The PostScript driver also produced visible stepping in graduated tints, which were rendered more smoothly when the PC software was left to handle them. If you do need PostScript for DTP work, however, it's nice to have the option.

The Xerox produced excellent results in colour.At 9.2p and 1.8p per page for colour and mono respectively, running costs are at the higher end of this group, but unless you're planning to print seriously high volumes, this is more than offset by the purchase price currently on offer.