Pros & Cons
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- Top tier graphics and photo quality.
- Innovative color adjustment feature.
- Prints at up to super-tabloid size (13 by 18 inches) and banner size.
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- Although text qualifies as high quality, it's not the impressively high quality of the graphics and photos.
Xerox Phaser 7500/DN Specs
| Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Adobe Acrobat 8 - 4 pages, text and photos (landscape): | 0:34 (min:sec) |
| Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Microsoft Excel 2003 - 1 page, graph: | 0:14 (min:sec) |
| Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Microsoft Excel 2003 - 1 page, table A (with grid): | 0:16 (min:sec) |
| Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Microsoft Excel 2003 - 3 pages, charts and graphs: | 0:19 (min:sec) |
| Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 - 4 full-page slides: | 0:27 (min:sec) |
| Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Microsoft Word 2003 - 2 pages, text: | 0:16 (min:sec) |
| Color or Monochrome: | 1-pass color |
| Connection Type: | Ethernet |
| Connection Type: | USB |
| Cost Per Page (Color): | 10.6 cents |
| Cost Per Page (Mono): | 2 cents |
| Direct Printing from Cameras: | No |
| Duty Cycle: | 150000 pages per month |
| Input Capacity (printer input only): | 600 sheets |
| LCD Preview Screen: | No |
| Maximum Standard Paper Size: | Supertabloid |
| Network-Ready: | Yes |
| Number of Cartridges: | 4 |
| Number of Ink Colors: | 4 |
| Photos - HIGH -QUALITY SETTINGS - Adobe Photoshop 7 - Average output time per print: 4" x 6" prints : | 0:18 (min:sec) |
| Print Duplexing: | Yes |
| Printer Category: | Laser |
| Rated Speed at Default Settings (Color): | 35 ppm |
| Rated Speed at Default Settings (Mono): | 35 ppm |
| Tech Support: | www.support.xerox.com; 1 (800) 835-6100; One year onsite warranty |
| Tech Support: | Xerox Total Satisfaction Guarantee |
| Technology (for laser category only): | LED |
| Type: | Printer Only |
The first thing you need to know about the Xerox Phaser 7500/DN ($3299.99 direct) is that it's the first printer to use Xerox's natural language color control—an innovation that's worth knowing about even if you have no need for a printer that prints at tabloid size (11 by 17 inches) and larger. The second thing is that it's an impressive printer. It has with reasonably fast speed, high quality text, and absolutely top tier graphics and photo output. If your office (or graphic arts shop or department) wants to print its own professional looking output, the Phaser 7500/DN will be hard to beat.
Some basics first: The 7500/DN is one of four models that differ primarily in their paper handling capacities. The others are: the Phaser 7500/N ($2,999.99 direct), with a 600-sheet input capacity and no duplexer (the 7500/DN adds the duplexer); the Phaser 7500/DT ($3,799.99 direct), which adds an additional 500-sheet tray; and the Phaser 7500/DX ($4,999.99 direct), which adds an internal hard drive plus a set of three 500-sheet trays, for a total 2100-sheet capacity.
You can also buy any of the lesser models and then add the hard disk ($499 direct), the duplexer ($399 direct), and more trays (at $596 direct for the single 500-sheet tray or $1199 for the three-tray unit). The models are all identical otherwise, so all the comments in this review apply to all four. All four also come with a one year on-site warranty and Xerox's total satisfaction guarantee, which promises that if the printer is not performing the way you would reasonably expect it to while still under warranty, Xerox will either repair it to bring it up to spec or replace it with a new printer or comparable model.
Now on to the interesting part: the natural language color control that Xerox calls Color By Words. Adjusting color for printer output has always been much harder than it should be. The problem is that printers define colors by the amount of each primary color they use—cyan, yellow, and magenta. People who work with color a lot eventually learn through trial and error how to fix color problems by adding or subtracting some combination of the primary colors, but that's not how people naturally think about color.
Most people will look at a picture and notice a tint or notice that the grass doesn't look green enough or that a photo they took on a bright day looks like the sky was overcast. What Xerox has done is to come up with a way to map those intuitive descriptions to changes in cyan, yellow, and magenta levels. With Color By Words, if you don't like the colors you see on the page, you can open the driver and make changes by picking from a series of drop down menus.
The menus let you define adjustments as simple as green colors slightly more green and as conceptually complex as all colors except skin tone colors considerably more zippy. (Really. Zippy is in the drop down list as a quality you can increase or decrease, right along with colorful, cloudy, foggy, bright, sedate, strong, and sunny. Less surprising choices include blue, brown, pink, purple, and red.)
You can also define multiple adjustments, so you can, for example, pair very light sky-blue colors a lot more blue with foliage-green colors slightly less dark. I'll come back to how well Color By Words works when I discuss my test results, but I'll mention here that the process of picking from the menus has no learning curve, and the choices on the drop down list are almost entirely self-explanatory.—
Setup and Performance
The hardest part about setting up the Phaser 7500/DN is finding enough flat space for it and moving it into place. The printer measures 15.7 by 25.2 by 26.2 inches (HWD) and it tips the scale at 145 pounds. It's actually a relative lightweight among tabloid-size color laser printers, however. It's much lighter than the Editors' Choice
Once you've rounded up enough people to move the printer, the actual setup is easy. It consists essentially of removing the packing materials, loading paper, plugging in the power cord and cables, and then running Xerox's automated installation routine from disc. I installed the 7500/DN on a network, using a
As I've already suggested, the 7500/DN offers reasonably fast speed. It's rated at 35 pages per minute (ppm) for both color and monochrome, which translated to a 7 minute 54 second total on our business applications suite (timed using QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com). That makes it a touch slower than the CL7200D, at 7:19. On the other hand, it was much faster than the CL7200D for photos, averaging 18 seconds for a 4 by 6 and 25 seconds for an 8 by 10.
Output Quality
The 7500/DN's output quality is its strongest point. Text is just a half step below the best available, with more than half the fonts in our tests qualifying as both easily readable and well formed at 5 points, some passing at 4 points, and none, including heavily stylized fonts with thick strokes, needing more than 8 points. Unfortunately, Times New Roman is one of the fonts that needed 8 points, because of a character spacing issue at smaller font sizes. Having a problem with such a common font could be an issue for some offices that need small font sizes. Most offices, however, should find that the printer can handle any text they throw at it.
I saw no flaws worth mentioning in our graphic tests. The quality is without question in the top tier for color lasers, easily good enough for any business need, and good enough even for a graphics professional to consider using for final output going to clients. Photo quality, similarly, is as good as I've seen for a color laser on plain paper, also making it suitable enough for any business need.
This combination of high quality text, graphics, and photos is enough to let you print professional looking marketing materials on the same printer you can use for standard office output. It helps too that the printer can handle paper sizes ranging from 3 by 3 inches to 13 by 18 inches, as well as banner format up to 12.6 by 47.2 inches.
Even though I didn't see any problems with the colors that printed by default in my tests, I made a point of reprinting some photos using the Color By Words feature. I particularly wanted to see whether I'd get the results I expected from a given command without having to go through a learning process to find out what the different commands actually did.
I found basically no learning curve. When I told the driver to print with moderately less pink or slightly less green, the results were pretty much what I expected. I even made an outdoor photo look like it was taken on a bright day by telling the printer to make the photo more sunny. Xerox could make the feature better still by including an on-screen preview feature, but even the way it stands, Color By Words offers a powerful, surprisingly easy to use tool for adjusting colors.
The Phaser 7500/DN is easy to recommend and would be an Editors' Choice (replacing the
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