Xerox Phaser 7500 – A New A3 Color Printer

Model Xerox Phaser 7500 is designed to replace the already obsolete printer Xerox Phaser 7400. This is the youngest model among the A3 printers. Xerox Phaser 7500 is aimed primarily at small and medium-sized workgroups who want more than just fast and good printing, but also inexpensive color office printing.

Appearance

There are four configurations of Xerox Phaser 7500: 7500N, 7500DN, 7500DT and 7500DX. The first is the most basic and does not support duplex printing. DT version is additionally equipped with a more capacious feeder tray, and standard equipment in DX is even more capacious hard drive and tray. Any of the standard configurations can be expanded with additional options. All models can be equipped with a special stand with compartment for supplies.

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The first thing you notice when you open the box is that the Epson Workforce 600 is a nice looking machine. The sleek looking printer will fit in with the decor of most offices or it might even improve the decor of your office space. The Epson Workforce 600 is a feature rich printer at a very affordable price ($199). It can Print / Copy / Scan / Photo / Fax plus it has WiFi . Consumers will find that the user interface on the Epson Workforce 600 is very user friendly thanks to the 2.5? color LCD screen that tilts for easy viewing.

The printer is a pure speed demon without compromising any quality. Epson is trying to entice small business consumers that are looking into laser printers for the office and they will succeed based on speed, price and laser quality . Epson claims the Workforce 600 is twice as fast as their competition and I believe it. The print outs are not as fast as laser but pretty damn close. It can print out 27 ppm of text or 19 ppm of color.

It has built-in memory card slots for PC-free printing. You can even crop directly from the printer itself. Epson uses DuraBrite ink that is smudge, fade, water and highlighter resistant. The 4 printers cartridges are all individual and you have the option of using a standard ($12.35 for color, $17 for black) or high capacity ($17 for color, $20 for black ) for any of the colors and a extra high capacity cartridge for the black ($28.50). The paper is loaded from the back and no issues with any printer jams. Another plus for this printer, it uses up to 3x less power than a laser printer.

Sending and receiving faxes is super easy thanks to the 2.5? LCD screen. It can store 60 fax numbers on speed dial and it can receive up to 180 pages in memory.

You can copy in black and white or color and everything is straightforward due to the great user interface and the bright display. Just load the automatic document feeder, enter your settings, hit start and before you even turn around the copies are done.

Now with built in Wifi, it makes setting up the printer to work on your network wirelessly child’s play. Just follow the setup instructions on screen from the included setup disk and your wireless printer network will be up in running in minutes. You can also connect via Ethernet cable or USB.

The Epson Workforce 600 is a perfect addition to any small or mid-sized office. During this economic downturn where every dollar counts, you will be hard pressed to find a better printer for $200 that does everything this sleek looking printer can do.

Brother has pushed itself up into second place in the laser printer market by producing a wide range of well-made, high-value machines. The HL-6050D is a medium-size workgroup mono laser printer with built-in duplex facilities. It’s reasonably expandable and Brother claims a top speed of 24ppm, so it should be quite quick.

The printer is square-cut, but looks modern, even in its slightly passé cream case. A substantial, 500-sheet paper tray can be supplemented with an optional second one and there’s a 100-sheet, multi-purpose tray, which folds down from the front. Paper feeds to the HL-6050D’s top surface, next to the printer’s controls.

The control panel is simple, but covers all the essentials. There’s a four-way dial for navigating menus and dedicated buttons for starting and cancelling print jobs. The final button is marked Reprint and it’s good to see all the controls are marked with Braille codes, for the sight-impaired.

The Reprint button does what the name suggests; it reprints the last job sent to the printer. This is ideal if you want to print a single copy and proof read it, before completing the rest of the job. It could be a security problem though, if you don’t clear the function after printing a confidential document. There’s no USB socket on the front panel for walk-up printing, which would complement the Reprint function.

The two-line LCD display has a twin-colour led backlight, which switches from green to orange to indicate alerts and errors; a neat solution. The menu system itself is easy to navigate and offers good control of the printer’s functions.

Installing the consumables is straightforward: fold down the front panel and you can slide in the two-part drum and toner cartridge. The drum has a service life of 30,000 pages and each toner cartridge should produce 7,500 ISO pages, so maintenance isn’t going to be a day-to-day affair.

The bundled software includes drivers for PCL and Postscript page description languages, both in emulation, and drivers for Windows, Mac and Linux are available. Ethernet networking is included as standard, together with appropriate monitoring software. Brother also offers an optional wireless adapter, so you can free the machine from a cabled network connection, if you need.

Anybody who has ever used a Polaroid Instant camera will know how convenient it was to have a picture immediately after taking it to show to your friends or as a record of an event. While it’s still very easy to take instant photos in a social setting, typically with a camera phone, a paper copy is harder, ironically, since the demise of Polaroid’s instant film cameras.

As some recompense, Polaroid is the first company to introduce a printer based on ZINK Imaging’s new technology. ZINK, which stands for Zero INK, uses no inks, ribbons or coated films. Instead, all the technology needed to produce a full-colour print is held in three layers of transparent crystals, coated on the ZINK paper. A thermal print head sends pulses through the layers to heat the appropriate set of crystals and produce a colour image.

The small, black and silver printer is easily pocketable and comes in slightly smaller in volume than the power supply used to recharge its Li-ion battery. It has a type one USB socket on the side to take a PictBridge cable from a camera and the only control is a power button. A pair of three-colour LEDs show charge and power status, and prints feed out from a narrow slot in one end of the printer

Installation and set up could hardly be easier. A catch on the end of the PoGo releases a spring-loaded lid and 10 sheets of ZINK paper fit into a recess in its body. Clip the lid shut again, and it’s ready to print. There’s no software, as this printer doesn’t work with PCs; only with cameras and mobile phones. The phone connection is via Bluetooth, and all you need to set that up is the printer’s pin, which the phone requests before completing the link.

While there’s no doubt that the PoGo printer is extremely convenient and easy-to-use, the ZINK technology is not at a stage where you’re going to see good images. Give it some more development and another couple of generations and it might get somewhere near the standard of the old Polaroid instant photos.

ZINK licenses its technology to Polaroid, but this isn’t an exclusive licence and other manufacturers are known to be working on cameras and laptops with built-in ZINK-based printers. We’d like to see larger prints, at least up to the size of old Polaroid instant prints, and fervently hope the next generation of the print technology will offer greater detail in the images it produced.

However, if you want a printer that’s immediately fun as a talking point, and one that produces expensive, business card-sized prints you can stick on your friends, the PoGo is ideal.