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| Xerox Phaser 3400 |
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Hardware Reviews July 2001 • Vol.4 Issue 7 |
Xerox Phaser 3400 | ||
Jump to first occurrence of: [PHASER] [3400]  Xerox is gunning for its competition's share of the small workgroup market with the new Phaser 3400. And if the 3400 is any indication of Xerox products to come, the company's competitors have their work cut out for them; this Phaser is a value-packed printer for a very affordable price. The 3400 has all the goodies: 1,200dpi (dots per inch) resolution, manual duplexing, N-up printing, and a Fit-to-Page option, among many others. It's also stout enough to handle a 40,000 page-per-month duty cycle. The massive 550-sheet paper tray is enough for most workgroups, and if it's not, simply add an optional tray to boost capacity to 1,200 sheets. To begin our tests we first printed one page of test fonts. Output was extremely quick, dark, and crisp. Unfortunately, the size one font was nearly invisible, much less readable. However, output improved with our next test. The first page of our 10-page text file was printed at 300dpi and completed in 0:13 (minutes: seconds). Only 0:44 later, the entire document was complete, giving the printer a rating of 13.6ppm (pages per minute). Though we used the lowest resolution setting, we had hoped to see somewhat darker fonts. As it was, these rough-draft fonts were very light (especially italicized words), but still readable. For important documents you'll have to bump up the dpi setting. Our next challenge for the 3400 was a six-page Word text/graphics mix. The improvement in text quality at 600dpi was immediately noticeable, with darker blacks and clearer fonts. Clip-art graphics looked sharp and had very little banding. Better yet, the printer hardly slowed, sporting a 12.4ppm rating and a 0:12 first-page-out time. PowerPoint slides showed similar quality and printed at a rate of 9.5ppm. One area that mid-priced monochrome lasers often struggle with is photo-quality images. The image that the 3400 presented to us was too light and a little wavy, but it still looked much better than pictures we've printed on more expensive lasers. Details were adequately sharp, and shading was good too, but the 3400 falls just short of producing clear, high-quality graphics. The base model of the 3400 includes parallel and USB (Universal Serial Bus) connectivity options, but no network capability. A 10/100Base-Tx Ethernet upgrade is available for $275, should you suddenly decide it's a necessity. We'd suggest buying the network-ready model right away, as this printer is most useful in a small workgroup environment. The 3400 is outfitted with a 166MHz RISC (reduced instruction set computer) processor and 16MB of RAM. For the text files this machine is designed to handle this should be plenty of hardware, but just in case, RAM is expandable to 80MB. Forty-five scalable fonts are installed, as is one bit-mapped font, and the printer also supports emulation for PostScript 3. The $149 high-capacity toner cartridge will yield about 8,000 pages. That means you'll be printing at less than two cents per page, which is about as inexpensive as laser printing gets. For workgroups that print a large volume of text, the Phaser 3400 is worth a long, hard look. by Nathan Chandler
$649 Xerox (877) 362-6567 (503) 682-7377 http://www.xerox.com
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