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.

By design, Xerox Phaser 7500 is not much different from the other office workhorses — clear plastic with accents of gray and blue. However, the gloss characteristic for home printers would be clearly redundant here. Ethernet and USB 2.0 ports are on the right side of the device and the power connector is behind. The main paper tray is below, and manual tray paper leans to the left. Finished prints fall into the cavity on top of the printer. Because of the size, the printer required a separate cabinet. Yes, it also weighs a lot — from 66 kg in the base configuration to almost a hundred at maximum.

All controls are located on the upper panel: the power button, a block of four keys to perform basic operations, the buttons for cancellation of the current job and displaying help information, as well as the indicator of the printer. All information is displayed on a small LCD-screen in six rows. Initial configuration and basic management of printer and print job can be done using it, so it should be bigger and more informative. In standby mode, the screen displays information about the level of toner cartridges. When you click on the help button shows a hint on the current operation, on printer status, on errors in the work and so on.

The front panel opens up and gives you access to toner cartridges and toner waste tray, which greatly simplifies the basic printer maintenance. There you can also find other service plugs. Rods for cleaning the LED arrays are located here as well; you should treat them extremely carefully. The remaining elements are for specialist, you’d better not even touch them. On the inner side of the flip cover there’s a sticker showing all types of compatible cartridges.

Printing

Initial installation and setup of the printer should not cause difficulties. The device comes with a CD with drivers and other support software to facilitate the daily work with the printer. Most of the basic operations can be conducted through a Web interface of the Xerox Phaser 7500. It’s nice that the developers supported of a large number of different operating systems, which for some companies is very important.

After turning on, the printer takes about a minute to heat up. You can start printing right after that. According to the manufacturer, the printing speed is 35 A4 pages per minute. In reality, the speed of printing is slightly lower. Black and white and color prints of A4 size are created approximately at the speed of 30-32 pages per minute. Color and black and white A3 prints are printer in amount of 18 pages per minute. First Print Out Time is  8.07 seconds. However, much depends on the document formats. For example, pictures with ultra-high resolution or large PDF with complex formatting are processed more slowly.

Xerox Phaser 7500 can print on paper measuring 100-320 mm in width and 140 – 1200 along with a fairly wide range of densities: 67-280 g/m2. Although theoretically there might be some problems with high-density paper due to the fact that during the printing sheet is bent at an angle of almost 90 degrees. The device also supports printing on different types of media: envelopes, labels, films, etc.

The printing mechanism is LED single pass based on HiQ LED technology. Maximum print resolution is  1200×1200 dpi. Quality of black and white prints is high. But color prints is just good, not perfect. Despite the rather broad possibilities of color correction, Xerox Phaser 7500 is sometimes a little wrong in color reproduction. There are problems with halftones, smooth transitions of colors. However, do not forget that it is still office solution, not photo printer. the Xerox Phaser 7500 is well suited to print posters, presentation materials, infographics, diagrams, and the rest.

For the working groups not only the speed and quality are important, but also competent organization of the printing process and control over it. Using proprietary Xerox software you can easily create a centralized system for monitoring and managing networked printers. One can manage user access, calculate costs, set up notifications, arrange secure printing and so on. The result is a very flexible software and hardware, which is easily adjusted to the needs of your organization. Interestingly, the Xerox Phaser 7500 saves all settings on a special configuration card. So if you have to replace the printer for the same one, it would only be sufficient to plug the card into the new printer.

The cost of one black-and-white A4 print is about 1.3 cents. Color printing will cost significantly more – in an area of 10 cents per page. In this case, the printer is designed for the monthly load of 150,000 pages. In general, Xerox Phaser 7500 can be called a fairly economical. Energy consumption it is also quite good – up to 670 watts during operation and up to 97 watts in idle mode. During printing, the printer makes a noise not very strong, but still it is better placed at a distance from jobs.

Conclusions

Xerox Phaser 7500 is of good quality and fast print speeds and good fuel economy. With proprietary software, you can create a competent infrastructure for the management and control over the printing process. This printer model does not have some obvious shortcomings, except for relatively high cost of color prints. The printer is well suited for small and medium workgroups or for a relatively small organization.