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Follow UsXerox has come out with this monochrome MFD that has all
the features to suit the needs of mid-sized enterprises and workgroups. It's a
laser printer, copier, scanner and fax. The MFD can also directly e-mail any
document that you scan. If you have heavy-duty paper requirements, then you can
even add additional paper trays to it, at an extra cost, of course. The device
connects to your network so that multiple users can share it.
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The device can be managed in three ways. You can either
manage it from the keypad on the device itself. There's an LCD panel to view
your settings, and you can configure everything from the paper size, contrast,
number of copies, to tray selection and watermarks. You can also change the
network parameters like IP address and other details from here. You can also
configure the device from a Web browser, rom here, you can do real-time and
periodic monitoring of the device. The device stores logs of all functions
performed by it, which can be accessed through the Web browser. Plus from here
you can have an eye on the paper tray (percent of paper left) and the toner
(percent of toner left). The third and final way to manage the device is by
installing drivers. One interesting thing that we noticed here is the number of
options for this monochrome printer is as detailed as a color printer. The drive
gives you a six-tabbed dialogue box from where you can set everything including
the common paper settings to detailed graphics settings and watermark settings
to fax settings and phone books.
Another interesting feature that caught our attention is an
option with which you can copy multiple-sized pages in one go and the printer
automatically detects the right paper size and gives the output on the same
sized paper. So for example if you are copying 10 A4 and five A3 copies at the
same time through the ADF of the MFD, and the paper is kept such that A3 sheets
are in one tray and A4 in another tray, the printer will automatically copy the
A3 pages on A3 paper and A4 pages on A4 paper. One more additional feature that
this device has is that it can take print of multiple pages in a single page for
editing or preview. We tried to print eight pages in one A4 sheet and found the
quality of the print decent enough and readable. On the faxing front, this
MFD has faxing capability inbuilt into the driver. So if you want to send faxes
you don't need any other software, just type your document in Word or any
other word processor and send it across the network. You can even use the
Windows address book to get phone numbers for sending faxes. It has other
features like both side printing and scanning to e-mail. But all these features
are additional and you have to pay extra for them. On the performance front, the
MFD's printer lived up to its rated 18 ppm print speed. In over-the-network
printing, which we tested on a moderately busy 100 Mbps network, we found that
it took 10 secs to print the first page, which is pretty good. The rest of the
pages came out after every 3 secs, giving its rated 18 ppm print speed. The
copying also resulted in the same 18 copies per sec. Quality of prints was
pretty good, with good
graphics, prints and fonts readable down to point size 2.
Bottom Line: A good choice for enterprises, given
all the functions it supports, including the capability to do over- the-network
faxing.
Anindya Roy