Xerox WorkCentre 4118x

This mono laser-based MFD from Xerox has printer, scanner, copier and fax

functions rolled into one. You have the convenience of automatic duplex printing

where you can get printouts on both sides without having to change manually.

Another useful feature is the 'Booklet Printing' mode that provides

sequential printouts for booklets. In the 'Pages per side' mode, you can

accommodate upto 16 pages on a single side of a printout with good readability.

While copying, you can use the 'Book Copy' mode to take printouts for two

pages of a book simultaneously.

There is one intelligent option, the 'Booklet' mode, where the device

provides printouts of adjacent pages of a book in the same order (in duplex

mode) as your pagination. So, you can simply bind pages and a copy of the book

is ready for your reference. However, the size of the book that can be

copied/scanned is restrained by the small scanning bed of the device. ID Card

Copy provides printouts for both sides of a card on the same side in the

printout.

The scanner has a pre-scan resolution of 75dpi and an optical resolution of

600dpi. 'Secure fax receive' directs incoming fax to your passcode protected

mailbox located in the MFD, instead of allowing it to get printed. So, you can

forward or store your fax for taking a print later. You can also store scanned

documents in this mailbox, so that they can be faxed to multiple people. It took

us 52 secs to send/receive fax at 33.6 kbps.



The WorkCentre has a dedicated memory of 64MB for its printer and 8MB for fax
that can store up to 640 pages. It has USB and parallel ports. Plus, it has the

option of having a 10/100 Ethernet port for network connectivity. The device

supports Internet printing and Web-based management. For Internet printing, it

comes with CentreWare Internet software.

The MFD has a rated printing speed of 18ppm. However, we got 16ppm in our

tests, while printing a multipage document. Further, it took about 14 secs to

print a single page text-intensive which is about 4 secs longer than the rated

speed.

We tested its scanner by scanning an A4 full color photograph at 300dpi; it

took 47 secs to completely scan this photograph. The WorkCentre takes 9 secs to

copy a single sided A4 size document, and 16 secs to copy both sides of the same

in duplex mode.

Bottom Line: A true multifunction device, which although priced

slightly higher, justifies it with innovative features.