Xerox Phaser 6125 Review June 27, 2011 11:07 by Matt Bird

Overview

At just over £120, the Xerox Phaser 6125 colour laser printer is a genuine bargain and a good looking one at that. The quality of print is very good and speed is reasonable, in comparison with rival machines in its class. Unfortunately though, the value doesn’t look so good when it comes to its consumables – it’s dearer to run than some other budget colour lasers and those colour lasers can’t compete with equivalent business inkjets on print costs. Consider your long run printing costs and availability of compatible cartridges if you are looking at this printer.

Ratings

Xerox Phaser 6125

Main Review

The Xerox Phaser 6125 is a good looking, state-of-the-art colour laser printer with a surprisingly low price tag. Ideal for home or small office use, its unusually stylish white case has a small footprint and a contrasting blue control panel, incorporating large green and red status LEDs, as well as a 2-line by 16-character backlit LCD display, supported by a diamond-shaped arrangement of navigation keys. The paper tray holds 250 sheets and there’s no optional second tray, although there’s a single-sheet, multi-purpose feed slot. In these eco-friendly days, it’s always useful to have an extra tray to recycle paper for internal documents, or for special media. Drivers for Windows, OS X and at least five versions of Linux are available, but the Phaser 6125 doesn’t use a page description language, for example, PCL or Postscript. The printer comes with network connection as standard, as well as USB. A wireless adaptor and extra memory are options, though 64MB is provided. The machine comes with toner cartridges, fuser and photoconductor drums pre-installed and to get it running it’s a simple matter of removing tapes and papers and locking the toner cartridges in place. Xerox claims speeds of 16ppm for black print and 12ppm for colour, but under test our 5-page text document gave 7.69ppm, the 20-page text job gave 10.5ppm and a text and colour graphic document came out at 8.11ppm. Each print is preceded by some time spent ‘processing’ and ‘calibrating’, according to the printer’s LCD screen. We saw good print quality overall, with really sharp text, even in the smaller sizes. Colour graphics were bright and clear, with smooth, vibrant colours. As is so often the case, we saw a degree of mis-registration with black text superimposed over colour. The 15 x 10cm colour photo print, which took eight seconds, was disappointing – it came out too dark and with a slight red cast. Although this can be partially compensated for by adjusting the colour presets, it may require some fiddling. The consumables on cheaper colour laser printers tend to be expensive and the Xerox Phaser 6125 is no exception here, but look into the availability of compatible 6125 toner cartridges which can save you an awful lot of money. Overall, a very nice printer for the price, with beautiful text printing. As long as you are not after large amounts of image printing, this could be a very good printer for your office environment.