Xerox Phaser 6125

Colour laser printing is getting cheaper and cheaper: the Xerox Phaser 6125 is close to the current minimum, while still offering all the essentials of colour printing.

It's a neat little printer, made more so by a design that has the 250-sheet paper tray poking out of the back and making the main machine seem smaller. The paper tray also has a single-sheet feed, for special paper that can be inserted one sheet at a time.

Because the main part of the printer is vertically mounted, with the toner cartridges mounted one above the other, the Phaser 6125 has a small footprint even though it's quite tall. Paper ends up on the top, feeding out towards the back.

The dark blue panel holding the display and controls is all that breaks up the white casing. It includes a two-line 16-character backlit screen with simple navigation controls for the well-organised menu system. There are two large indicators for power and errors.

Unusually, the toner cartridges slot in behind a panel on the right-hand side, even though the paper path runs up behind the printer's front panel. Xerox claims speeds of 16 pages per minute (ppm) for black and 12ppm for colour prints, but in our more realistic tests, which include the time the printer takes to process each page, in managed 10ppm and 8ppm respectively. These speeds are very reasonable, so it's a shame they had to be hyped.

Prints from the Phaser 6125 were generally good, with crisp black test and bright colours from the 600dpi machine. Positioning of black test over colour was a little off, so we saw the occasional white 'halo' on our test images, but overall there was little to complain about. Even photos, the bane of the colour laser, reproduced adequately, though often a little dark.

The only consumables Xerox quotes prices for are the toner cartridges, which are available in capacities of 2,000 pages for black and 1,000 pages for colour. Page costs come out at 3.1p for black and 14.6p for colour pages. The colour cost is high and is where Xerox is recouping some of the low price of the printer itself.

Even so, this printer represents great value for a colour laser: although the RRP is higher, it’s available for as little as £130 online.

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