Xerox Phaser 6140 Review

It's too noisy to put on your desk next to your phone, but otherwise the Xerox Phaser 6140 is a fast, capable, and -- especially with its optional duplexer -- convenient color laser printer, a clear improvement on the model 6130 it replaces. At $399, it's easy to like ... but Xerox has made it a little hard to buy, at least until next year.

You see, as we've written before, Xerox has a habit of discounting older, fuller-featured printers until they collide with newer models with lower prices. That's happened now with the new Phaser 6140 and the Phaser 6280 introduced last February: The 6140 at $399 plus its double-sided printing unit at $149 adds up to $548, while a $100-off deal good through December 31, 2009 has lowered the duplexer-equipped Phaser 6280/DN to $549.

That means that an extra dollar buys a printer that's faster (rated at 26 color and 31 black-and-white pages per minute versus 19 and 21 ppm, respectively); holds more paper (400 versus 250 sheets); has a higher duty cycle (70,000 versus 40,000 prints per month); and delivers lower costs per page (2.7 versus 3.5 cents for a black and 13.9 versus 17 cents for a color page, respectively, in Xerox's published figures).

That's an across-the-board win for the 6280/DN, even for solo or three- or four-person offices that would normally gravitate to the 6140 and leave the 6280 to larger workgroups. So as much as we like the Phaser 6140 -- and we do -- we can't recommend you buy it until either the discount deal on its older, beefier sibling expires on New Year's Eve or the newer model gets a price cut of its own.

Tall, Light, and Handsome

The 6140 is an upright white iceberg of a printer, standing some 16.5 inches tall and taking 16 by 18 inches of desk space. Once you wrestle the 41-pound device out of its box, setup consists of pulling free a dozen strips and streamers of tape and locking the preinstalled black, cyan, magenta, and yellow toner cartridges into place.

The latter, located behind a door on the printer's right side, are compact, roughly TV-remote-sized modules that slip into carriers that swivel into position and lock by sliding a plastic latch into place. It's one of the easiest cartridge-handling setups we've seen in either the laser or inkjet worlds.

In the ignoble tradition of printer vendors everywhere, Xerox provides 1,000-page starter cartridges instead of full ones in the box. Replacement yellow, magenta, and cyan cartridges are rated for 2,000 pages and priced at $90 apiece; the black cartridge is rated for 2,600 pages and priced the same. The 6140's operating costs of three and a half cents per black and 17 cents per color page are about average and slightly steep, respectively.

The pull-out front paper drawer holds up to 250 letter- or A4-sized sheets (it's too short for legal paper); it can be paired with a second 250-sheet drawer for $199. A slot in the front of the drawer lets you feed single sheets or envelopes manually. Printed pages exit face-down atop the printer, propped by a pull-out tray.

A button at top right lets the hinged front of the printer pivot down to reveal the preinstalled imaging unit. The optional duplexer snaps into place inside the front door in seconds, with no tools required. Interestingly, unlike other double-sided setups we've seen, it handles sheets in pairs -- it prints page 2, retracts the sheet, prints page 4, retracts that sheet, then prints and ejects sheet 1 (pages 1 and 2), then sheet 2 (pages 3 and 4), and so on -- but it worked without a hitch or jam in our testing.

An Energy Star sticker on the drawer indicates the Xerox's thrifty 8-watt power consumption when asleep, which by default kicks in after 30 minutes in standby (50 watts) or printing (280 watts). Setup changes such as setting a different idle time or switching off the status pages normally printed at power-up, or canceling a print job in progress, are about the only reasons for using the front-mounted LCD menu and control buttons; printing options such as N-up (multiple pages per sheet) output are handled by the provided PostScript 3 driver. PCL shops will find a PCL 6 driver on the setup CD. The 6140 works with Windows 2000 and higher, Mac OS 10.3 and higher, and SUSE and Red Hat Linux.

Both USB 2.0 and 10/100Mbps Ethernet interfaces are found at the printer's rear. A WiFi adapter is available for a pricey $219, and a 512MB upgrade for the Phaser's standard 256MB of memory is available for a coronary-causing $719.

Terrific Throughput

Xerox boasts that the 6140's 600 by 600 by 4 dpi print engine (4 bits of color information per pixel) gives more vivid color and smoother transitions and gradients than lesser lasers. We still consider its four-color photos to be a bit more grainy and less lifelike than six- or more-color inkjet prints, but newsletter- or flyer-sized pix looked perfectly nice.

And workaday text and charts looked fine, with crisp, dark text as small as 4 or 5 points and smooth solid color areas. The Phaser won't keep you waiting, either: Our one-page business letter with spot-color company logo printed in 15 seconds. Twenty single-spaced pages of monochrome text took just 1 minute and 11 seconds, and a 55-page PDF document mixing black text, colorful headlines, and a variety of images was ready in 3 minutes and 7 seconds.

We're rapidly becoming hooked on the tree-saving, office-space-saving benefits of double-sided printing, at least for in-house materials. So we were glad to see that the Xerox's duplexer didn't slow printing too much, delivering the 20-page Word document in 1 minute and 36 seconds and the 55-page Acrobat in four and a half minutes.

If you don't want duplex, the Phaser 6140 at $399 is half a C-note under the discounted Phaser 6280 at $449. That's a wider gap than the mere dollar between duplex versions, but we still think the 6280's greater speed and lower costs per page make it the better buy -- just as we'd pick the 6140's extra speed and PostScript support in a contest between it and the company's entry-level, host-based Phaser 6125 ($349). As is, we'll give the 6140 a thumbs-up, but Xerox's discount on the 6280 steals the new printer's thunder.