Color printers hit higher speeds

The Aficio CL7200's control panel and Adobe PostScript driver are identical to those on the Aficio CL4000DN -- and so are our complaints about the overstuffed, underdeveloped PostScript dialog. As with the Aficio CL4000DN, its printed manuals cover setting up and using the printer in good detail, but the on-screen manuals on advanced topics seem less thorough and somewhat scattered.

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The Aficio CL7200 base model we tested costs $2,900; you can add a 40GB hard drive for a pricey $550 and a duplexer for $300, making it cheaper than the HP Color LaserJet 5550dtn even when equivalently configured. Ricoh rivals thrifty Kyocera on consumables prices.

Xerox Phaser 6300DN

The Phaser 6300DN ranked high in our roundup for one major reason: It's fast at both text and graphics printing, a tough juggling act for most color printers. Busy offices that want a real workhorse will appreciate that, but they'll have to put up with mediocre text quality and fairly pricey consumables.

The Phaser 6300DN's engine looks fast on its spec sheet -- 36 ppm for monochrome printing and 26 ppm for color -- but its 21.7-ppm text speed was bested by the supposedly slower Ricoh CL7200. The Phaser 6300DN's 13.8-ppm weighted graphics speed left the rest in the dust.

Print quality failed to follow the trend. Text printed on the Phaser 6300DN looked grayish and blurry. The printer struggled more than most to approximate some colors in our graphics samples; for instance, it painted cyan a dark teal and magenta a grapelike purple. Large areas of solid colors had some streaking, but shading progressed fairly smoothly. Grayscale photos looked murky and dirty but preserved some detail well. Color photos looked muted and grainy, but detailed.

Xerox gave the Phaser 6300DN's control panel a welcome touch of convenience but forgot to tie up related loose ends. The control panel LCD's top-level menu displays the "walk-up" features enabled by an internal hard drive, but confusingly, printers without a hard drive display the same menus. To tap into the walk-up features, the user's computer requires an extra driver install, which makes initial deployment cumbersome.

The Phaser 6300DN's design has its pros and cons. On the plus side, three well-marked buttons open progressively deeper sections of the printer, so replacing components or clearing jams is easy. The power switch is near the front and is well-recessed. The translucent plastic flap that covers the toner cartridges also doubles as the main output tray, but removing it doesn't stop the printer, letting print jobs fly out and land on the exposed toner cartridges. When the printer duplexes, pages poke out through the exit before flipping over, making it possible for impatient users to grab a half-completed page and derail the job.

Our test unit costs $1,499, including a duplexer. A 20GB hard drive runs $499; a 550-sheet tray, $399; a dual 550-sheet unit, $599. Thus, a well-appointed Phaser 6300DN is among the less expensive printers in the group. Consumables costs, however, are on the high side. At least you have a choice when upgrading memory: If Xerox's costly branded modules exceed your budget, the company won't fuss if you seek third-party alternatives.

Mainstream color is really here

When an office can get a decent color laser for as little as $999 (or a solid-ink printer for as little as $899), you know they'll only continue to multiply in printer rooms near you. They'll make it easier for people to produce nice-looking documents on their own -- a phenomenon that's surely making traditional printers nervous.

But they're not the end-all, be-all office printer yet. Although all the models we tested could theoretically be used for both simple memos and high-resolution photos, some offices could justifiably opt to retain a monochrome laser or LED printer for plain-text and draft jobs because it's still a faster, cheaper, less-complex machine than its finer-feathered cousin.