Color MFPs prove capable and costly

Of the few hard buttons on the control panel, we especially liked the separate monochrome- and color-copy buttons. Although you can, of course, adjust settings further before pressing either button, this completely straightforward design saves time and prevents accidental color copies. The machine's administrator can also PIN-protect color copying.

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The control-panel design sometimes confused us. On the principal soft buttons -- Original, Output, Paper Select, and others -- the label and the button look alike. The lack of a Cancel button when choosing settings made us wonder how to exit without saving. Some windows have two OK buttons -- one for the menu level you're working in and one for the whole setup -- which saves time for experienced users but could confuse novices.

As did all the devices tested for this review, the AR-BC320 printed too slowly to satisfy an active office. Text pages crept out at 15.1 ppm, graphics at a mere 3 ppm. Copying times were better: a zippy 29.7 ppm for plain-text documents and 14.6 ppm for graphics pages.

The MFP's output quality is acceptable for general-business documents. Printed and copied text both looked good; in the latter, diagonal strokes looked jagged. Color graphics, both printed and copied, displayed uneven coverage in large areas of solid colors. Color photos looked dark and dotty but managed to preserve some detail.

Xerox WorkCentre Pro C2636

Xerox's WorkCentre Pro C2636 rates highest among the color MFPs in our roundup because it's fast, well-equipped, and adept at combining sophisticated capabilities with the user-friendliness that a busy workgroup needs. It also seems to offer competitive pricing.

The WorkCentre Pro C2636 is carefully designed and mostly well made. The scanner, ADF, and control panel sit securely on the arms of a steel exoskeleton; the printer component nestles underneath. A small plastic shelf on the machine's left side provides a convenient place to park papers while you're setting up a job. Access doors and paper trays feel sturdy; the latter are easy to adjust. Only the foldout auxiliary input tray feels a bit flimsy, as most do.

The configuration we tested included the High-Capacity Feeder option, which stacks two 520-sheet, tabloid-size trays plus dual 1,000-sheet letter-size feeders underneath the printer. Between the printer and the scanner you'll find a standard, 400-sheet output tray that can offset collated copies. Several external finishers are also available. With the fax option, our unit lists for $17,890 -- at first glance a good value, though we don't know what a real-world, negotiated price for any of these MFPs would be.

The WorkCentre Pro C2636 is very approachable, thanks to a control panel designed around two physical buttons -- Features and Access -- that divide most functions between managing the system and using it. In Feature mode, the color-coded LCD displays a row of buttons for principal functions, each complemented by tabs of hierarchically arranged settings. Access, where you set up the machine's defaults, follows a similar structure.