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| Panasonic KX-P8415 |
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Hardware Reviews December 2000 • Vol.3 Issue 12 |
Panasonic KX-P8415 | ||
 Panasonic set out to make a color laser printer that wouldn't break the bank. They succeeded in that they produced one for less than $2,000, but sometimes value means that performance must be sacrificed. This printer does the job, but it moves at its own pace, which won't rival that of an Olympic sprinter by any means. The KX-P8415 runs on a 75MHz PowerPC chip and comes with 32MB of memory standard. The total memory can be increased to a maximum of 288MB. The KX-P8415 has a standard parallel port connection, and you can add an optional 10/100 Ethernet connection for networking. The KX-P8415 is one big, fat laser printer. It measures 18.2 inches high x 30.9 inches wide x 19.6 inches deep and weighs in at an elephantine 108.4 pounds. Make sure you set this thing on something sturdy. The KX-P8415 has a standard 350-sheet paper tray. The KX-P8415 can print black-and-white pages pretty fast, up to a maximum of 16ppm. In full color mode, it can print 4ppm. This printer has a resolution of 600 x 600 dpi and does not include support for PostScript. It is compatible with a nice array of operating systems, including Windows 9x, 2000, Me, and NT4. The KX-P8415 prints colors well enough, but it's a bit on the slow side according to our tests. The printer took its sweet time printing out the first page of our test 10-page text document; it took 44 seconds, and the entire document was printed out in 1:20. We would have thought the KX-P8415 could print basic black-and-white text faster than that. Clearly, the warm-up time is the culprit here. Still, the results were good: The text looked very sharp and dark. The PowerPoint test also took longer than we'd like. The printer needed 46 seconds to print out the first page of this three-page document and 1:13 to print the whole thing. That's just too long, in our opinion. But as with our first test, the overall quality was solid. Finally we ran our Photoshop test. Because this is a color printer, we'd expect it to take longer than a black-and-white laser printer to print out our test image, and so it did. The KX-P8415 printed our test image in 7:28, again pretty slow. The colors did look OK, although the image was slightly too dark. The KX-P8415 is a decent printer with one flaw: The model we tested printed too slowly for our taste. The quality of the printed materials was acceptable, but we don't like to stand around and wait for them. by Michael Sweet
$1,795 Panasonic (800) 742-8086 (201) 348-7000 http://www.panasonic.com
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