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Color & Monochrome Lasers
Continued from page: 1
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Entry Level Color Laser Printers
Xerox Phaser 6120
Price: Rs 19,990 (1 yr warranty)
Contact: Xerox India, Gurgaon
PH: 9810296115
Email ID: d.bernard@xerox.com |
+ Lowest price,
high on features
– High cost of consumables |
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This is the lowest priced color laser printer in the shootout. The printer is
meant for small offices. The rated color and monochrome print speed is 5 and 20
ppm respectively and it lived up to its spec in our tests. Xerox 6120 offers
USB, parallel as well as Ethernet options.
The printer also offers various expandability options such as adding a duplex
unit, hard drive and extra RAM. The printer can print at 2400 dpi, which is the
highest resolution for this category. The printer is powered by 300 MHz 32-bit
RISC processor and 128 MB RAM (expandable up to 640 MB). But, to expand the RAM,
you need to spend substantial money. To upgrade from 128 to 256 MB it will cost
you Rs 6,120. To expand the RAM to the maximum possible, you have to shell out
Rs 24,480, which is more than the cost of the printer itself.
Quality wise, the printer gave excellent output in color and mono, and
achieved highest scores in performance tests in this category. It scores the
highest points for features as it provides maximum RAM expandability and a
higher capacity paper tray. Another added bonus is that the printer supports
both PCL and Postscript, and is even Pantone certified.
It gives color prints @ Rs 5.90 and mono @ Rs 1.21 per printed page. Plus,
you have to spend Rs 8,853 for replacing the drum after printing
20,000 pages.
Bottom line: This is the best printer in
this category, due to its performance and features.
HP Color LaserJet 2600n
Price: Rs 19,999 (1 yr warranty)
Contact: HP India, Gurgaon
PH: 2566111
Email ID: kakuni.mahto@hp.com |
+ Good price,
no need to replace the drum
– RAM is not upgradeable |
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This printer has a rated color print speed of 8 ppm, which is higher than the
other two in the category. However, its monochrome print speed is also
8 ppm, which is much lower than the other two. Being an office printer, it has a
network interface. It comes with 16 MB RAM and unfortunately, this cannot be
upgraded. Moreover, it does not have a duplex unit for double-sided printing,
which comes built-in with the Samsung printer.
However you can avail duplex printing on this printer, manually, using its
driver. The capacity of the input paper tray is 250 while that of the output
tray is 125. The printer can print at upto 600x600 dpi resolution. It gave us
good quality color prints and very good black and white prints for daily office
work. However, in the Grayscale test, it gave average quality mono prints due to
slight banding. For printing full color graphics, the printer took 22 secs and
for printing multiple pages it gave 8 ppm speed as rated.
It warmed-up in about 20 sec, which is acceptable if the printer is connected
to a network. In line art printing, the print quality was excellent with smooth
lines. In the CMY print test, the print quality was sharp but there was slight
banding in the printed sheet. The printer gives you full color prints @ Rs 4.50
and monochrome @ 60p per page, which is the best rate in this category. Plus,
the printer has an in-built imaging drum, which saves on the cost of replacing
the drum at the end of each duty cycle.
You just need to spend for its color and black cartridges.
Bottom line: A very effective printer
overall, but loses out on features.
Samsung CLP-510
Price: Rs 20,000 (1 yr warranty)
Contact: Samsung India Electronics, Delhi.
PH: 41511234
Email ID: anupam.k@samsung.com |
+Low cost per color page and highest ppm in this category
– Below average print quality, generates too much heat |
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This is the heaviest color laser printer in this category. The model comes
with a USB port only, but you can add Ethernet capability. The printer can print
color images or text at up to 1200 dpi resolution. It has a duplex unit, an LCD
display and navigation buttons to control the print job, and for configuring the
settings. The printer has a Samsung SPGPM processor with 64 MB RAM, expandable
to 192 MB. Moreover, it has optional wireless connectivity. We were not too
pleased with this printer's print quality. In every print, the color was
darker than it should have been, with deep color shades. Same was the case with
mono prints. When we took a CMY print, it gave a small rectangular patch at the
center of the page.
We re-calibrated the cartridge and re-did the test many times, but the results
were the same. It printed at 5 ppm in color and 24 ppm in mono, just 1 ppm less
than the rated speed. Still, this is the highest speed in this category.
The fuser of the printer generated too much heat compared to others. If
people stand near the printer to collect the printed pages, they have to
tolerate the hot air coming out of the fuser unit. The Samsung CLP-510 has a
cost per page for color prints of Rs 3.87 and Paise 76
for mono. It has the lowest cost per color print.
Bottom line: An average printer overall,
but good enough for routine office text printing requirements. Next Page : Mid Range Color Lasers Page(s) 1 2 3 4 5 6
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