Labs

Xerox's Phaser 6130 is the lightest printer in the group, and one of the smallest. It was easy to set up once we'd removed all the internal packaging and protective sheets, although this was fiddly in the case of the toner cartridges.

The installer automatically detected the printer across our network, but as with the HP printers, we found we had to reset the driver's default page size to A4 before our documents would print correctly. The Phaser's driver also resizes content to match the paper size by default, which can make for strange-looking printouts. These problems were annoying but easy to solve. As well as a 250-page paper tray, the Phaser has a single-page feed slot, but when we tried to print envelopes using the slot, they

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were crumpled and the text misaligned.

This is the only printer here to use Adobe's PostScript 3 page description language rather than a host-based PostScript emulation, but print quality was still poor. Mono documents were the worst in the group, with some letters suffering from a faint shadow around their left edge. Most of our colour prints had a slight red tint, particularly pale colours and flesh tones in photo-quality images, and many also looked grainy. Our greyscale shading test results were also grainy, although all but the very palest shades were reproduced accurately.

The Phaser's mono print speed is poor and its colour speed unremarkable at just 10.8ppm mono and 4.2ppm colour. Mono print costs are the most expensive in the group, while only the budget TallyGenicom 8108N has higher colour costs. Replacement colour cartridges last a stingy 1,900 pages, while the photoconductor unit has a life of only 30,000 pages, after which the whole printer has to go in the bin.

Although Xerox's printers have an excellent pedigree, this particular device produces disappointing results. The quality of its mono text prints is substandard, and we weren't impressed by its colour printing. This, in combination with high print costs and a short-lived photoconductor drum, means this printer has little to offer.